Everyday Movies: Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture 2020014430, 2020014431, 9780520331686, 9780520331693, 9780520974371

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Everyday Movies Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture

haidee wasson

University of California Press

Everyday Movies

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Robert and Meryl Selig Endowment Fund in Film Studies, established in memory of Robert W. Selig.

Everyday Movies Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture

haidee wasson

University of California Press

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Haidee Wasson

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wasson, Haidee, 1970– author. Title: Everyday movies : portable film projectors and the transformation of American culture / Haidee Wasson. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020014430 (print) | LCCN 2020014431 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520331686 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520331693 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520974371 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture projectors—History—20th century. | Motion pictures—Technological innovations—History— 20th century. | Cinematography—United States—History— 20th century. Classification: LCC TR890 .W37 2020 (print) | LCC TR890 (ebook) | DDC 777—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020014430 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020014431 Manufactured in the United States of America 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Stella and Ava

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Portability and Projectability

1

1. Engineering Portability: The Rise of Suitcase Cinema

37

2. Spectacular Portability: Cinema’s Exhibitory Complex, American Industry, and the 1939 World’s Fair

71

3. Mobilizing Portability: The American Military and Film Projectors

110

4. Portable Projectors and the Electronic Age

143

Epilogue: Vectors of Portable Cinema

176

Notes

183

Bibliography

239

Index

263

Acknowledgments

There are so many people who helped me along with this book that it is difficult to know where to start. Complicating the sheer volume of interlocutors is the long, twisting path that I followed to get here. This project had its first real boost from my McKnight Landgrant Professorship, University of Minnesota. During this phase, Steven Groening provided crucial research assistance and steady friendship. Among the many gifted colleagues in Minneapolis, I want to single out John Mowitt, John Archer, and Ron Greene, who each provided intellectual guidance and inspiration. Raina Polivka at University of California Press has been a breath of fresh air with her clear-sighted and unswerving support. Madison Wetzell has ably helped to guide me through the production process. Fantastic readers’ reports helped me to improve this manuscript immeasurably, providing lengthy, specific, and general commentary that is the stuff of writerly dreams. This project has also benefited from the support of Le Fonds de recherche du Quebec, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful every day to have the support of strong, accessible, public education and research funding that actively advocates for humanities scholarship. The digging required for this book began before the digitization projects that have utterly transformed historical scholarship had reached a critical mass; it was also immeasurably shaped by this sea change. So, I must thank Eric Hoyt and his entire team for building the Media History Digital Library. And, in the same breath, one cannot say enough about the influence of Rick Prelinger, who released the floodgates of print materials and other ephemera. The possibilities of film and media history have opened up in ways I could not have imagined ten years ago. We all owe these people, and all others who labor to shore up research infrastructures, a ix

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debt that we can only repay by doing good and interesting things with the materials their efforts have bequeathed us. In addition, I have benefitted from archivists and resources at the magnificent New York Public Library, the New York Historical Society, the George Eastman House, the National Archives and Records Administration, the University of Iowa (Iowa City), Iowa State University (Ames), the University of California–Santa Barbara, the University of Maryland, and Duke University. A fruitful visit to the Prelinger Archive in San Francisco proved particularly helpful, hosted by Rick, whose charms and bountiful knowledge never cease to amaze. Barbara Miller also provided essential support, with access to resources held at the Museum of the Moving Image, Queens. Dino Everett engaged with my research questions and opened the doors to the Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, University of Southern California. Brian Real provided able assistance navigating the National Archives and Records Administration. Ron Magliozzi and the inestimable Charles Silver also helped me through the Brandon Collection at the Museum of Modern Art. Thanks also to Oliver Gaycken and Kaitlyn McGrath for providing orientation, advice, and valuable resources. This project began as one devoted to so-called nontheatrical cinema and evolved into a one that amounts to a rejection of that term’s centrality. I began to search for other ways to conceptually capture the scale and scope of what I was discovering. This process was particularly fueled by the generosity of colleagues who invited me to present my ongoing work in a host of venues. Particularly helpful were opportunities to present my work at Carleton, Laval, Harvard, and New York University. Presentations at the University of California, Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara, as well as University of Southern California, were each stimulating and sun-shiney encounters. Papers delivered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan State, McGill, and Northwestern University, and at the Universities of Iowa, Marburg, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Toronto, also helped to smooth out the edges, identify key issues, and dig deeper into what was at stake here. Invited lectures delivered at such gatherings as the Chicago Film Seminar, the Screen Studies Association of Australia (Monash University), the Screen Conference (Glasgow), the Films that Work Harder Conference (Frankfurt), New Cinema History Conference (HOMER/ Glasgow), Media History from the Margins Conference (Switzerland), and the Misfits Symposium (Carnegie Museum of Art) all provided grist for the mill. Among the many conversations I would like to thank Paula Amad, Erika Balsom, John Caldwell, Tim Corrigan, Michael Cowan, Scott Curtis,

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Liz Czach, John Ellis, Andreas Fickers, Murray Forman, Allison Griffiths, Malte Hagener, Vinzenz Hediger, Mette Hjort, Jennifer Horne, Priya Jakumar, Jonathan Kahana, Aleksandra Kaminska, Caren Kaplan, Charlie Keil, Sarah Keller, Jeff Klenotic, Barb Klinger, Richard Maltby, Paul Moore, Lisa Parks, David Rodowick, Ariel Rogers, Jake Smith, Eric Smoodin, Shelley Stamp, Alexander Stark, Jonathan Sterne, Kristen Whissel, Deane Williams, Pamela Wojcik, and Yvonne Zimmerman. This project also grew enormously during a one-year visiting professorship at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I feel sincere and significant gratitude for the time spent there in the orbit of such a stellar cadre of scholars, among them Peter Bloom, Michael Curtin, Bishnupriya Gosh, Jennifer Holt, Ross Melnick, Patrice Petro, Bhaskar Sarkar, Greg Siegel, Christina Venegas, and Janet Walker. Chuck Wolfe, whose generosity and professionalism are models for us all, read parts of this manuscript and generously shared his wisdom. I also benefit from a supernaturally stimulating research culture at Concordia University in Montreal. Colleagues in my home department provide daily reminders of what makes this all worth it. Sincere appreciation goes to Luca Caminati, Kay Dickinson, Martin Lefebvre, Josh Neves, Katie Russell, Masha Salazkina, and Marc Steinberg. Working out from there is a circle of local colleagues involved in the Media History Research Center, among them Jason Camlot, Sandra Gabriel , Fenwick McKelvey, Elena Razlagova, Jeremy Stolow, Peter van Wyck, and Darren Wershler. Having a strong cadre of engaged media historians in my midst has been instrumental. A network of cherished colleagues have especially shaped this book. Their generous reading of drafts and regular, ongoing discussions deserve special recognition. Lee Grieveson has been a career-long collaborator, and his sharp mind and hard queries have made me a better scholar for over twenty years now. Greg Waller has supported this project for almost a decade. His steady collegiality and sober second thoughts have been indispensable. Dana Polan read this entire manuscript in its early stages. His generosity continues to amaze and surprise me. Justus Nieland has inspired me with his work on film and design and provided pivotal feedback on chapter 2. Both Eric Hoyt and Alice Lovejoy have read this beast twice, and at each turn helped me to hone argumentation and shore up my evidence. Vanessa Schwartz aided me in ways that only she could. Louis Pelletier provided precise and rigorous commentary from beginning to end, supplying helpful tips, documents, and his unparalleled expertise. Keir Keightley—through long and ongoing discussions—has consistently pointed the way toward rigor and the necessity of thinking comparatively

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about media history. His boundless curiosity and enthusiasm is infectious, thankfully. I have been blessed with a rich traffic in budding scholars who have come into the orbit of this project and performed some of the courageous archaeology that built it foundations. Kristen Alfaro deserves a special shout-out for her months of burrowing away in the various New York institutions that yielded up treasures. In addition, Bruno Cornellier, Natalie Greenberg, Phillip Keidl, Matthew Ogonoski, Kyla Smith, and most of all, Kaia Scott, who has read every word and seen every blemish. Thank you. This book has thrived on the good will of friends who, in addition to being smart, have just made it all more fun and rewarding. Mike Zryd and Tess Takahashi have been stalwart confidantes. Brenda Weber has never failed to say the right thing. And Jennifer Holt has given me a whole new way to think about airstreams, mud, and snitching, not in that order. My one-of-a-kind father, Daniel Wasson, also spent countless hours fixing my sordid prose. Thanks Pops. Finally, while there are few words to fully describe his contribution, Charles Acland must be recognized. We discussed this project over breakfast, lunch, dinner, and coffee, during road trips, daycare drops offs, hospital visits, child birth(!), grieving, and joyous celebrations. A team of experts working round the clock could not have crafted a more brilliant and inspiring partner. Lastly, it should also be said that early versions of sections of this book have been previously published as: “Experimental Viewing Protocols: Film Projection and the American Military,” in Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex, coedited with Lee Grieveson (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 25–43; “Selling Machines: Portable Projectors and Advertising at the World’s Fair,” in Films That Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising, ed. Nico De Klerk, Bo Florin, and Patrick Vonderau (London: BFI, 2016), 54–70; “The Protocols of Portability” Film History 25, nos. 1–2 (2013): 236–47; “The Other Small Screen: Moving Images at New York’s World Fair, 1939,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 21, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 81–103; “Suitcase Cinema” Cinema Journal 51, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 150–54.

Introduction Portability and Projectability

Media fly, orbit, hover, and float. The scale of our media and their movement varies significantly from speedy and interplanetary to settled and deep beneath the sea. An assortment of earthly conveyance systems also shuttles our words, sounds, and images along. Some travel by air and others by wire; millions of books, vinyl records, and DVDs are delivered along roads by trucks. It is also true that media move with our bodies. Today we carry phones, MP3 players, and computers, reaching for them in our pockets, purses, backpacks, and briefcases. Devices made to be moved by humans signal the enduring imbrication of media machines not only with our eyes and ears but also with our torsos, shoulders, hands, heads, and fingers. A quick look at the history of media design reminds us that portable media (machines we carry) are not unique to the present. Radios with belt clips, cameras with straps, and televisions with handles demonstrate the importance of the body throughout media history.1 Wheeled mechanisms such as carts and dollies have also helped to spread our media load; while we have long worn our machines, we have pushed and pulled them as well. Expanding Marshall McLuhan’s lasting insight that media are extensions of our physical and sensing selves, inversely, media can also be thought of as part of our everyday weight—adding heft and even a particular silhouette or gait to our self-carriage. This pairing of portable media with our bodies and their movements tells us something about the ways in which small devices act as interfaces between us and our cultural content, introducing dynamics that shape our relationships to media in the broadest sense. When media are portable, cognate concepts rise to the fore: accessibility, affordability, ease of use, durability, adaptability, and—crucially—programmability shaping the “who, when, where, what, and why” of media experience and use. As such, 1

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portable media have subtended transformations of basic concepts and practices not just of making, looking, and listening but also of leisure, learning, and work, to name but a few. Some media devices are more readily associated with qualities we can group under the rubric of portability: transistor radios, cellular phones, laptops. Each of these readily imply movement on a human scale. They fit in our pockets or in our hands. They might work while in motion, and they can often be carried with minimal effort. Used in many locations, portable media devices perform a range of functions and enable a degree of user control. For some forms of media, however, the concept of portability has been far less salient. Take, for instance, the history of cinema. The resolutely unportable movie theater has long played a key role in our understanding of why and where we watch movies, helping us to distinguish cinema from other moving-image media. There can be no doubt that the theater’s darkened and seductive spaces housing big screens, multidimensional sounds, and often controlled climates are central to the rise of film as an industrial, artistic, and popular form. These sites have hosted the screens and projectors that transform images secured on celluloid into large-scale audiovisual experiences, what some refer to as “the magic of the movies.” Projectors and theaters are fundamental to our experience of recorded stories, ideas, information, travel, art, entertainment, and what it has meant to watch and listen throughout the twentieth and into twenty-first century. Our fascination with the movie theater is in part a fascination with the architectures of projection and confirms the sustained significance of largescale illumination, amplification, and performance to our mediated lives. Everyday Movies shares this interest in projection as a transformative and foundational process. Yet it proceeds from the assertion that movie theaters are but one small branch of a much larger history of film projection that has for too long stood in for the whole. In other words, our fascination with the movie theater has effectively clouded our ability to see and assess the full range of projected film forms. This includes those that were the most common and numerous throughout the twentieth century, with crucial and formative legacies extending into the twenty-first—namely, cinema machines that were designed with a seemingly simple imperative: to move. The complex history of portable projectors, and the films and viewing scenarios they enabled, have long been relegated to the margins of film history. Yet, by number, portable projectors easily eclipsed the archetypical movie theater. Moreover, portable film projectors comprised a generative technical substrate not just more extensive than but also notably distinct from cinema’s theatrical iterations. These small machines were highly adaptive

Introduction

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3

and included a family of devices deployed in varied spaces and performance scenarios. Portable projectors were not simply curiosities and occasional gadgets destined to become dusty basement junk. They were not merely a domestic memory tool or a hobbyist’s delight. Nor should they be understood as primarily a substandard method by which to re-create the seamless illusion of a professionalized, theatrical presentation apparatus. Rather, by midcentury, portable film projectors in the United States were highly productive, common, familiar, accessible, everyday technologies offering up a diverse body of films to millions. They comprised a widely visible element of a thriving small-media ecology, catalyzing a myriad of uncharted but widespread and influential protocols and practices. That these devices were already a commonplace element of an expanding media ecosystem at midcentury makes redressing their absence from film and media history plainly necessary. Moreover, this expanded media history also demonstrates that the everyday screens currently residing in our pockets descend precisely from this lineage of twentieth century film technologies that effectively normalized the place of small, accessible moving images in our everyday and institutional lives. Rather than a recent aberration from the dark, immobile theater in which we “used to watch movies,” the dispersed, formal, and informal dynamics of moving images are charted here as central elements of our past century as well as our current one, situating film history as integral to the rise of our present cross-platform, mobile, media environment. Mapping the proliferation of these machines, Everyday Movies documents the conditions in which film projectors became everyday media. It focuses on the late teens through to the 1950s, examining the technological standardization and institutionalization of portability within but then mostly beyond Hollywood. It ends during the decade in which portable projectors categorically outnumbered movie theaters, becoming the most common viewing platform for showing and watching films. Key dates include 1923 and 1932, when the American film industry codified the small-gauge film formats of 16 mm and 8 mm respectively, distinguishing them from the larger, industry-standard 35  mm gauge. These new smaller, lighter apparatuses used nonflammable film stock and were precisely designed to minimize cost, weight, and size, as well as to maximize ease of use and movement, contrasting with the professional technologies in commercial movie theaters. The spread of these diminutive devices up until World War II was steady but, compared to the contemporaneous rise of radio, notably minor. During the 1920s and 1930s, American industry became early adopters, using portable projectors in its communication, public relations, and exhibition activities. Minor use in homes, schools, and museums

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Introduction

grew comparatively slowly. The war years catalyzed a remarkable surge in the American manufacture of small projectors. Military use of film technologies increased dramatically, making portable film projectors standard operating equipment and securing them an expansive global footprint. Everywhere soldiers went, a projector inevitably followed. At the end of World War II, the formation of a major civilian filmviewing and film-performance infrastructure within the United States can be readily observed. Consider that in 1947 there were 18,059 conventional four-walled movie theaters operating throughout the country, 2,000 fewer than immediate postwar highs.2 That same year American manufacturers such as Bell and Howell, Eastman Kodak, RCA, and Victor Animatograph shipped 92,858 16  mm projectors, and 215,533 8  mm projectors.3 Throughout the following decade, movie theaters chart a steady decline down to 11,335 theaters in 1959.4 This contrasts with the 4,632,500 portable film projectors estimated to be in concurrent use.5 Thus, by 1959, for every single commercial movie theater in the United States there were 408 small portable projectors in operation. These devices continued to proliferate rapidly, and by 1969 portable, self-operated machines outnumbered theatrical screens by a ratio of more than 875:1, with an estimated 8,526,000 projectors in use, compared to 9,750 movie theaters.6 By 1980 the ratio likely grew to well over 1,000:1.7 In other words, while the number of theatrical sites steadily declined after the war into the 1970s, this small, adaptable, programmable, portable film apparatus dramatically, unapologetically ascended, wending its way into homes, schools, libraries, retail outlets, trains, planes, museums, factories, government and corporate offices, research labs, and ongoing military operations. From the end of the war and for decades, manufacturers of portable projectors year after year churned out hundreds of thousands of devices, cumulatively creating a technological infrastructure that for almost fifty years provided a primary interface between film viewers and projected images. Such numbers make portability and projection a basic fact of film and media history, one that plainly requires mapping and analysis. This viewing infrastructure handily complicates the routine assumption in film and media history that the movie theater is the historically situated and de facto site of American film and our experience of it. To neglect consideration of portable projectors is to overlook the most common, accessible, and quotidian means by which film prints have been shown, watched, heard, and engaged with from the end of World War II and into the 1980s. There is a simple premise at the heart of this book: Watching films is a peculiar kind of proposition, one that has entailed a rather complex series

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figure 1. Portable film projectors were normalized elements of the postwar consumer media ecology. They rose alongside radios and televisions as familiar elements of the electronic age, characterized by convenience appliances and pushbutton media. The national infrastructure of small-media repair shops provides a clear view to one aspect of the ways that such devices became part of mediated life at midcentury, both as working machines and broken (but fixable) ones. Photo: Victor Animatograph Records, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa, circa 1949.

of technical, institutional, and cultural shifts that can only be fully understood if we denaturalize some of the long-standing assumptions that have limited our discussions about film viewing.8 Everyday Movies does this by charting the numerous devices that shed the architectural, industrial, and regulatory weight of the theater and instead extolled notably contrasting virtues, including lightness of weight, accessibility, adaptability, ease of use, affordability, repairability (figure 1), and—perhaps most important of all—programmability. These devices provide a revealing entry point into the history of moving images and sounds, demonstrating the myriad ways in which still, discrete images and sounds captured on celluloid transformed into moving, illuminated encounters across a gamut of institutions and sites. Importantly, these encounters were rarely brokered by a vertically organized, profit-seeking film industry, nor should they be characterized

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simply as instances of film exhibition, the commercial presentation of movies to a paying and pleasure-seeking mass audience. Rather, through the rapidly growing network of portable machines, films were frequently and regularly presented to small audiences and private individuals, many of whom gathered as institutional subjects: students, soldiers, scientists, workers, managers, family members, scholars, artists, and activist-citizens. In other words, portable projectors—particularly those issued in the 16 mm format—entailed, authorized, and legitimated distinct kinds of institutions, audiences, and varied modes of viewing. These forms of viewing arose alongside and, in some instances, undergirded the more storied ideals of the renegade politico, the radical artist, and the noble amateur that tend to characterize noncommercial film histories. They also ascended alongside the so-called mass audiences of television and big-screen Hollywood cinema that all too often typify the era. This new technological infrastructure multiplied the locations where films could be seen and shown, making not just film viewing but film programming a basic element of cultural life. Film shows became everyday acts requiring selection, curation, and presentation. The ability to program films, to choose what would be projected and seen, made cinema into something much more akin to other small, consumer-grade media. Similar to the phonograph and its effects on music, the portable projector changed how and why films were made, circulated, stored, programmed, presented, and experienced.9 Take but one element of these changes: film circulation, or what is often called “film distribution.” The film prints shown on portable devices traveled according to imperatives distinct from those that appeared on commercial film screens. While occasionally rented, these other films were also frequently lent, borrowed, purchased, traded, or simply pulled from a shelf, accumulating in countless public and private film collections and dedicated film libraries. Specific titles were ferried about under the aegis of official institutions of state, as well as clandestinely and unofficially in brown paper bags, collectively constituting a mix of formal and “informal” media circulation.10 Portable projectors and the films that played on them enabled the wresting of film programming away from the hands of a highly centralized commercial industry and created conditions in which, ideally, anyone could show a film. Do-it-yourself film performance dispersed the powers of projection, spreading them to amateur, artist, aristocrat, anarchist, and authoritarian alike. Not bound to the simple function of playing a film, these machines and their newly emboldened users took up projectors in ways that invited particular kinds of authority but also creativity, improvisation, adaptation, and occasionally subversion

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of formal and officially sanctioned media content and use. Projection was integrated into a myriad of cultural activities and agendas; programming easily became counter-programming. Equally important, this new infrastructure for film viewing created the conditions in which a broader range of films became possible, as there was a ready-made infrastructure for seeing them. The tens of thousands of film titles and hundreds of thousands of circulating 16 mm and 8 mm film prints available at midcentury index more than the widespread availability and use of movies. They also suggest that moving images had become everyday phenomena; they were increasingly integral to ever-widening spheres in an increasingly mediated era. Beyond entertainment, films were teaching, training, selling, and advancing spiritual well-being. They were integral to political persuasion, social work, industrial display, governance, psychological therapy, aesthetic experiment, and sex, to name but a few. As a result, the expanded function of movies was normalized. Moving images became familiar elements of an increasingly mediated world. Portable projectors shaped an emergent media infrastructure that catalyzed new kinds of films. Yet projectors were also far more than simply playback machines. With them, new modes of behavior and media engagement, or what we call “watching films,” arose. For instance, if you wanted, you could watch a film again. Or you could watch alone. You might select only the good parts, the useful parts, the naughty parts. Or you could require others to watch the most salacious, threatening, or instructive parts. A quick survey of design tendencies in these devices tells us something about what other kinds of presentation and watching these projectors facilitated. What emerges is something other than a singular machine or uniform model with an enshrined ideal. Rather, what will be charted here is a flexible and varied apparatus, one that was designed and used in full dialogue with forms and functions significantly expanded beyond Hollywood’s. Some projectors were highly specialized and made for research and analysis, replete with frame counters, precision machinery, and remote controls that enabled repeated stopping, starting, slowing, and reversing of a film. Some were rugged and designed as all-purpose, all-terrain, military machines decorated in army green or navy blue to signal patriotic duty and to assist in camouflage. Many others were manufactured for a mass consumer market, with minimal features operated by simple buttons and levers and proudly espousing low cost and high value. Still others were experiments, oddities, or artistic tools for creating multidimensional experiences, responsive environments, or industrial and public relations events. These devices integrated varied kinds of light projection with sound

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technologies that maximized their versatility. There was no single portable projector; the imperative toward adaptability meant that projectors developed to serve many purposes and were consequently part of an evolving multimedia constellation that often had plug-in ports, creating links to other media: slide projectors, microphones, record players, radios, and amplifiers. Portable projectors were thus integral to evolving small-media ecosystems that evinced commitments to improvisation, adaptability, and shifting applications that—taken on the whole—transcended strict adherence to the ideals of a particularly pure medium or to the institutions that directly arose to uniquely support one (i.e., the so-called film industry). This sea of machines created a form of cinema that was resolutely not the one normalized by the commercial movie theater or by Hollywood. Consider this example. A 1941 issue of Popular Mechanics featured a modern marvel of intermedial engineering: the phono-cine-radio-recordograph” (figure 2).11 The device merged a phonograph, radio, amplifier, sound film projector, and screen. It could record sounds but also play them, summoning them from shellac records or capturing them from the air. It could play a film on a small screen that sat atop the device, perched like a proud ornament in the center of the hulking console. Still years before television had proven itself commercially viable, the phono-cine-recordograph promised a highly integrated home entertainment unit, which the magazine dubbed “concentrated entertainment” for its ability to bring sounds and images together in one magnificent media machine. The sizable device also offered media storage and a host of input ports. Even at this size and multifunctionality, further adaptability was anticipated. Straining commonsense definitions of portability, the recordo-graph weighed in at eight hundred pounds, and it took an amateur radio enthusiast a year to design and build it in his basement. The machine might best be thought of as amateurism gone awry, fanatical tinkering, or perhaps even science fiction. Yet there it was in a mass-circulated, do-it-yourself magazine that promulgated the goal of explaining “how the world works,” the publication’s motto, to its readers. The projector appeared alongside ads for water-going pontoon bikes and tips for training gentlemanly dogs. It would be an odd one-off if it weren’t for the fact that other similar devices, fashioned for aspiring showmen, were being engineered and sold during the same period. The Victor 40, announced two years earlier by the Victor Animatograph Company, provides another such example (figure 3). Known as the “Add-a-Unit,” in production from 1939 until 1947, the projector similarly espoused a devout multimedia modularity. It could be purchased with a

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figure 2. The portability of film projection invited all manner of tinkering and jerry-rigging of media technologies, which also served to demonstrate the hybridity and intermedial possibilities of consumer-grade media technologies. Here a film projector became integral to a complex, multifunctional home entertainment system decades before such things were a practical reality. “Concentrated Entertainment,” Popular Mechanics 75, no. 6 (June 1941): 135.

record player, a radio, a microphone, a sound-on-disk recording unit, multiple speakers, and an auxiliary amplifier. The device invited users to create their own live or recorded soundtracks, to turn the volume up or down, or to make the image bigger or smaller. The company claimed that the projector played at different speeds and could be stopped in order to project a single film frame in suspended form. A portable screen, placed opposite to the projector, provided a stage for an unfolding show. Sold as an adaptable machine for public presentations and performances, the projector operated as a kind of base unit, one built to be moved, carried, and connected to other media machines, spaces, and uses. Unlike the bulky phono-cineradio-recordo-graph mentioned above, and more like other portable screens and projectors of its day, the Victor 40 came in a case integral to its design. A sturdy handle allowed it to be carried by a would-be projectionist with

figure 3. The “Add-A-Unit” was a media ensemble, modular and adaptable to a range of uses. The projector was a kind of base unit, to be completed or made whole by adding other devices to it. Advertisement of the Victor Animatograph “Victor 40” “Leadership: Victor 16mm Add+A+Unit Series 40” [sales pamphlet], August 1940. Victor Animatograph Records, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.

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figure 4. Kodascope Library Unit. These early home film units exemplify efforts to harmonize film technology with domestic décor. Note here that the projector is pictured in operation from behind a small, integrated screen. Rear projection devices helped to ensure that home screens yielded legible images in spaces that might not have room for a conventionally mounted screen or ideal, fully darkened lighting scenarios. The Catalog of Eastman Home Movie Equipment (n.d., circa 1930): 20.

ease. These multimedia units were widely advertised and available, inserting the projector into a whole, if aspirational, media ensemble. Portability and multimedia modularity presented opportunities for hybridity and adaptability but also created other kinds of challenges. As they operated in very different contexts, it was important that these machines fit well with their environments. Thus, in addition to offering multiple functionality, from the 1920s onward, these devices arrived in varied styles. Each of the components of the Victor 40, for example, were similarly finished so that they looked good as a media set. In an effort to create a domestic market, projectors were sold to sit atop desks and side tables and were often pictured beside books. Screens that might otherwise seem unsightly in a middle-class home were collapsible and could be easily tucked away in a closet or perhaps concealed by a tapestry. Some projectors, like the Kodascope Library Unit marketed in the second half of the 1920s, came inside handsome furniture units, replete with storage for the growing home film library (figure 4). Such consoles emulated early phonograph and

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radio design, anticipating the hi-fi units and television sets of the 1950s.12 Here the film apparatus became domestic furniture, implicated in family rituals and ideals of good taste. The home was understood early on by film equipment manufacturers as an important market. Yet, equally important, by the late 1930s, manufacturers actively created and marketed projectors as retail displays, automated information kiosks, museum exhibits, classroom tools, office machines, and industrial communication aids.13 Sometimes these devices looked like other machines, streamlined and metallic. Others, housed in ornate wooden consoles, resembled elegant display vitrines, like those in museums or shop windows. Similar devices also appeared in train stations, bars, and restaurants throughout the 1930s and 1940s, playing musical shorts, or what would decades later be called music videos.14 Some projectors operated like miniaturized and automated sales pitches, with looped product display films hanging from ceilings in department stores or sitting atop checkout counters. This variety of locations required that projectors accommodate spaces of different sizes and shapes, with multiple kinds of lighting. Projectors came with accessories that helped them further adapt. For instance, Kodak marketed its Kodascope L projector in the 1930s as “tailor made” for any space (figure 5).15 The device could be purchased with a selection of lenses and bulbs, placed closer to or farther away from the screen, and operated at different levels of brightness and in wide or narrow, big or small spaces. Kodak advertised “big pictures, short throws” in the (home) library as well as “extra-size pictures and full brilliance in church rooms, auditoriums, or at the club.”16 It was a machine capable of bespoke operation. Portable devices also could be purchased with an assortment of projector-screen combinations. Some operated conventionally with a projector in front of the screen; still others inverted this relationship, placing the projector behind the screen. Taking various descriptors such as “rear projection” or “daylight” projection, these devices limited the shifting effects of ambient, artificial, and ever-changing natural light on projection, increasing the utility and adaptability of film in different spaces (desktops, department stores, train stations, airfields) at any time, indoors and out.17 Other principles also subtended many portable projectors. “Selfoperation” was a primary feature, differentiating them from the professionalized apparatus so deeply rooted at the picture house. They worked by turning knobs and levers that were labeled and sized for ease of use by untrained projectionists, inviting manipulation, tinkering, and a degree of agency over projected images and amplified sounds. The principle of selfoperation was not only about enabling individuals but also about servicing

figure 5. Adapting to many differently sized, shaped, and lit spaces was a consistent design imperative for consumer- and business-grade projectors. “Kodascope L” [advertisement], Moviemakers 1935 (January): 26–27.

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large institutions with expansive needs predicated on effectiveness and efficiency. The American military, for instance, issued operating protocols for portable projectors during the war that not only maximized simplicity of operation, but also emphasized reliability. The armed forces sought a projector that could play steadily and consistently, withstanding near-constant use. Far more than consumerist convenience, quickly training soldiers to operate film projectors that could be easily set up, maintained, and repaired became a pressing wartime need. Movies were regularly shown by the military as a means to train the enlisted, to increase their morale, to speed along their healing, and to help prepare and repair their minds, inevitably affected by the traumas of war.18 These very same machines also became tools of military strategy, munitions research, and basic intra-organizational communication. Portable projectors were essential to military operations. In this concrete sense, films, and the machines they played on, became crucial instruments of war. Ease of use and reliability of operation were far more than advertising slogans; they were imperatives of global consequence put in service of unprecedented, technologically advanced, industrialized war efforts. Claims to self-operation also applied to the common feature of connected microphones, which combined image amplification with voice amplification, layering live accompaniment and prerecorded imagery. Simple plugn-play operations, toggle switches, and volume-control knobs helped to facilitate this process. Convenience and utility included the adaptability that live commentary implied, potentially reshaping every projection with scripted or spontaneous instructions, exposition, translation, and sound effects. Portable projectors maintained a complex relationship to sound devices in general. They were also connected to phonographs, and, after World War II, some were equipped with magnetic sound-recording devices that allowed users to orchestrate or add a range of recorded audio complements and voiceovers to film prints.19 This recordable and rerecordable sound function (a kind of making and remaking) became an aspect of what a film was, prolonging its useful life and performative capacity, reconceptualizing any given movie as incomplete and transformable, one part of some other presentation or application. As an example, during the 1950s, Kodak advertised its magnetic projector as a near-universal translator: the perfect business machine (figure 6). Cosmopolitan and rugged, multifunctional, multilingual, and highly adaptive, the Pageant was marketed as essential to “public relations, sales promotion, training, research reports, stock holder presentations.” According to Kodak, “school and church” found the machine “equally valuable.” Such advertising techniques and uses of the

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figure 6. Here the projector is a versatile, muscular, and also cosmopolitan machine, capable of recording, rerecording, translating, and ever-expanding operations. “Kodascope Pageant Magnetic-Optical 16mm Sound Projector,” Business Screen 18, no. 8 (1957): 49.

film projector tell us something about how projectors were being articulated to American industrial and business practices, as well as to American cultural institutions: adaptability and utility helped to make the controlled amplification of light, sound, and movement both familiar and essential.20 The projector’s adaptability took many forms. Kodak’s Pageant ran at several speeds, which allowed for showing films at their intended (default) speed while also permitting projection at other speeds to accommodate additional purposes. For instance, a film might be sped up for comedic effect. The projector had optical and magnetic sound capacity that enabled it to play silent films and conventionally recorded sound films (optical), as well as to record, erase, and rerecord sound tracks over a film print (magnetic).

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Practically, this machine’s designers had the useful film library in mind, one that throughout midcentury held an increasing number and variety of films to accommodate changing applications and audiences. Devices like the Pageant helped to adapt films to shifting demands throughout their life cycle. Magnetic projectors, specifically, were new technologies in the 1950s. User-oriented and predicated on an ever-changing film text, they invited active relationships with media and a dynamic understanding of film use. Programmability, a key affordance of portable projectors, was only a starting point to projection scenarios that blended showing, making, and remaking. These machines, in particular, were part of a technological economy that brokered in newness, agency, and a degree of control over any given film, which here included altering and repurposing sounds in order to transform previously recorded titles.21 Such devices remind us that, in the most basic sense, portable projectors were also—for a good deal of their history—sound machines. The earliest portable projectors did not have built-in sound capacities. During the 1930s and 1940s, projectors rapidly adopted electro-acoustic playback and amplification functions.22 In the 1950s, they further integrated postwar innovations in magnetic sound technologies. Throughout, radio and more so phonographs populated the imagery of portable film performance. From as early as the 1930s, projectors were occasionally even marketed as standalone sound machines, engineered and sold as public address systems or as suppliers of ambient background sound or music to fill in transitions for other kinds of performances and presentations. And, as important as sound was for portable projectors, silent-only film projectors continued to be sold even up until the so-called video era of the 1980s, complicating easy narratives about the American silent-film era ending and the sound-era beginning in the late 1920s.23 These facets of media history will be developed in the chapters that follow. For the moment, take note: portable projectors upend received timelines for histories of film technology, form, function, and use. The fact that portable projectors achieved critical mass in the 1950s provides another view of a decade perceived as one in which television dominated and theatrical commercial cinema declined from its postwar heights. Everyday Movies charts the conditions in which this other kind of cinema became a common form of midcentury media, alongside but distinct from theatrical moviegoing and also from the one-way broadcast flows of television. It notes key developments in other media, as well as media industries, in particular the one we call Hollywood. It also enacts a time line with its own key markers. In charting the rise of portable projectors, it is crucial to

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note that the spread of these devices should in no way be considered as yet another sign of Hollywood’s decline or as a radical rejection of its commercial logics. Of course, there was occasional objection by exhibitors to what they termed “free shows” of 16 mm film prints, whether those licensed by the studios or simply those made by the thousands of other film production entities in operation at midcentury. Similar outcries were heard over “jackrabbit” shows—a term used to name rapidly set up illegal projections of bootlegged Hollywood films shown on portable projectors, what today we would call pop-up showmanship or perhaps pirate performances. Despite the inevitable disputes over intellectual property, performance rights, and just plain old competition for film viewers, this book contends that the rise of these devices should first be understood as the emergence of a shared technological commonsense that called for the normalization of moving images across spheres—a process that became possible within the workings of the film industry itself. These projectors came out of the labs, organizations, and technological ferment that Hollywood nurtured and needed to thrive. While those who designed, sold, and used portable projectors rejected the constraints of big-budget narrative cinema, advanced technologies of presentation, controlled copies, and regimented shows, they also worked determinedly to expand the technological reach of film in the broadest sense, ensuring that projected images and sounds became integral to twentieth-century life in both big and small iterations. Like early histories of home video, portable projectors were somewhat at odds with established media practices as they loosened Hollywood’s control of film circulation and viewing. This new infrastructure can then be functionally explained through two broad frameworks. First, a new set of protocols and legal agreements had to be struck to effectively build a bridge from settled practices to new systems of licensing and presenting films previously intended for movie theaters.24 Second, the unique capacities of portable projectors also worked to diversify and expand the forms and functions of moving images and sounds in the most foundational sense, growing an area of film activity far removed from Hollywood’s primary business model. Everyday Movies dwells largely on this latter field of media change, asserting that this path reveals the ways in which film viewing became normalized and entrenched within an unfolding and layered media ecology at midcentury. This book uses portable projectors and their small screens as a thread for weaving together a very different kind of cinema than the one enshrined in film history. Specifically, it reframes the historical dynamics of cinema before and up to midcentury to include the place of portability in our

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understanding of film’s apparatus. Historians of early cinema have plainly demonstrated that the first film cameras and projectors were de facto lacking any kind of permanent home and, hence, were intended to be moved. They grew from and continued a century-long set of practices predicated on itinerant and techno-human hybrid performances using a range of optical devices, illumination sources, and projection practices: phantasmagoria, panoramas, shadow puppetry, lantern shows, illustrated lectures, among many others.25 Yet the specifics of what constituted portability changed as the technologies and institutions of film grew to yield something that is conventionally referred to as “cinema.” Scholars of early cinema tend to identify the evolution of particular qualities like narrative films, stable production practices, regularized exhibition methods and venues, and cultural respectability as key to the evolution of a wily technical innovation into something recognizable, sustainable, and enduring, and with a name: cinema.26 Most film histories presume that portability and the traveling shows it supported preceded such transformations and dwindled as the film industry rose.27 However, this book shows that portability and various forms of itinerancy, informality, and improvisation have endured and indeed grown throughout film history alongside well-charted other forms of settlement. Institutionally, the primary period under investigation is usually considered to be relatively stable in the history of American cinema and is generally known as Hollywood’s classical era.28 During this period, the American film industry matured stylistically and absorbed significant technological change (synchronized sound, color film, gigantic screens). It successfully managed labor unrest, important particularly during the 1930s. The studios had also sparred with persistent regulatory actions that emanated from many sides. This included negotiating with state, municipal, and other groups committed to exercising a degree of moralizing control over American cinema, in other words, “censorship.” It also entailed staving off federal oversight of Hollywood’s anticompetitive business practices.29 With television on the horizon, the American film industry exited the war years strong. Box office was record setting. Its position was further buttressed by a legacy of patriotic service earned through its wartime efforts. The studios had supplied films to the American military, provided talent and resources to military and government filmmaking efforts, and adapted their own commercial films to take clear patriotic stands on American heroism and military might. However, two key postwar tremors complicated Hollywood’s operations. The first was the Paramount Decree of 1948, which broke up the studio oligopolies and ordered the separation of production and distribution of films from their exhibition. In short, studios

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were forced to sell off their movie theaters. Second was the aforementioned rise of television, frequently blamed for the decline in film attendance throughout the 1950s.30 The analysis that follows adds a layer to the tectonic reshaping of American cinema by framing the growth of portable projectors as a largely uncharted media substrate, one that demonstrates film’s ascendance rather than decline throughout midcentury. These new and proliferating sites of moving-image performance were not necessarily architecturally grand or technologically magisterial. They did not immediately benefit from Hollywood’s ballyhoo or the machinations of a big show; they frequently lacked the glamor of stars, the anticipation of a premiere, or the escape of a matinee. They performed the seemingly humble task of enabling the performance of small images during a period when projected film images are best known in the United States as notably large and spectacular. Widescreen wonders like This Is Cinerama (1952) and the epic blockbusters that followed such as Ben Hur (1959), The Ten Commandments (1956), and Around the World in 80 Days (1956) were big-budget, technologically advanced films that won countless awards, scored big at the box office, and became markers of industry bravado.31 In contrast, the films that resulted from this other network were comparably small in many senses: simple stories, quotidian subjects, lowtech, miniscule budgets, micro-audiences. While many histories of film technology tend to be undergirded by narratives that chart increased realism and improved, seamless effects, the emergent technologies discussed in Everyday Movies were less fueled by the imperatives of immersion, illusion, or advanced stereophonic sounds. Instead, they thrived on principles of control, programmability, and access, deliberately forgoing those very innovations transforming the big screen.32 The portable apparatus struck another kind of technological bargain. For instance, while some portable projectors were occasionally hidden in consoles and behind walls, they were just as often operated in the space shared with audience and screen, disavowing the deep investments by Hollywood in an invisible or hidden presentation apparatus. Clicking and clacking became a normalized part of the small-film show, and the diminutive images tended to be comparatively grainy and dim. Poor audio quality remained a persistent complaint. The machines often broke down or ran prints that were damaged or selectively worn. Image degradation was a common occurrence with favorite scenes, which were often played over and over, causing frequent disappointment on the part of subsequent viewers who had to make-do with extra scratches, breakage, and perhaps warbled sound.33 A kind of imperfect cinema, this was akin to the videos described

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by Brian Larkin, for whom degraded images and sounds are not judged to be flaws per se but are seen as familiar and unavoidable features of the viewing experience.34 Similar to what Lucas Hilderbrand has written about home video, these were media forms in which access was prized and for which degradation and imperfection were common characteristics, fully accepted, and incorporated into their aesthetics and the practices that developed around them.35

Conceptualizing Portabilities Compared to the cognate and more contemporary term mobility, with its promises of global networks, cloud storage, and instantaneous digital data, the term portability can seem a bit quaint. Yet its persistence in media history—and in our media present—tells us something about portability’s enduring relevance for thinking through and about our media. I understand media portability firstly in the commonsense way of referring to the quality of being physically moveable, a potential for temporary or changing locations, and not dependent on any singular, stationary architectural structure. In addition, while all of the examples of portable devices that I discuss are considered analogue, arising before digital networks were a widespread reality, portability here also refers to what has been called “signal traffic,” the movement of media content across complex infrastructures and media formats.36 Following this, portable film projection can be conceived of as a set of technologies that enabled the convergence of images and often sounds that traveled along multiple routes, by varied means, and were implicated in a range of performance scenarios long before the affordances of video or digital technologies. Concretely, many portable projectors were highly ported—with input plugs for additional devices (radios, phonographs, microphones)—to complement or augment the films that played. So, in addition to the physical movement of films and projectors, these devices also require grappling with new ways to think about content, which often combined different methods of recording, delivery, and presentation. While a good deal of this content was secured and traveled on film stock, it is also undeniably true that these machines were often made for connectivity and interoperability with cognate machines. Thus, the term portability at times parlays this dual sense, both a thing that moves and adapts, and a port, a site for movement and transference of media signals, a potentially dynamic convergence of sound and image that disavowed any singular commitment to anything that remotely resembled media purity.

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Layering onto these technological affordances are also the cultural, imaginative, and ideational dynamics required to comprehend media as historical phenomena. This includes not only what such projectors did, and how these things were understood, but also what they were thought to aspire to, what their capacities were imagined to be. Throughout this book, portability (the capacity to move a thing) and projectability (the capacity to enlarge an image, illuminate a screen, and amplify a sound) are assumed to be historical, enduring, and significant technological facts of film throughout the twentieth century. What follows also asserts that media devices are not only functional things but also a set of powerful capacities. There is a paradigmatic precedent for this historiographical approach in the work of Walter Benjamin. And, to be sure, any serious consideration of portability and specifically projectability as a capacity of film cannot be disentangled from the more familiar and foundational ability to mechanically reproduce images and sounds, so powerfully discussed in his famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.”37 For Benjamin, reproducibility is a formative technological condition, a capacity that existed across many media: photography, print, phonography, and cinema. While Benjamin focused on this immanent capacity of media, he fully recognized that by 1935 this capacity was also a fact, most fully evident in his discussion of lithography, a nineteenth-century print technology that enabled the mass reproduction of words and images. It forever changed the meaning of traditional concepts of art, particularly those of singularity, uniqueness, and aura.38 That said, reproducibility—rather than reproduction—referenced an immanent capacity, an idea, a potential that itself suggested unique circumstances and media with seismic possibilities. Both fact and immanent capacity worked together to create what Benjamin theorized was a condition of modern life. Building on this basic commitment to thinking about media as sociotechnical capacities as well as historical realities, Everyday Movies charts the place of portable film projection in American cultural life. It maps and discusses particular devices and in doing so traces a particular historical capacity to project—that is, to amplify, perform, enlarge, and illuminate images, transforming spaces with reproducible moving images and sounds. Treating portability and projection as historical categories entails accepting that they are both to a degree relative and somewhat elastic concepts that changed in relation to technological, discursive, and institutional contexts. The dynamics of projection differed dramatically throughout the twentieth century, encompassing notable variations in scale, intensity, and function. Likewise, portability was not an immanent or inevitable technological quality; it evolved unevenly and at different stages of cultural,

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technological, and political history. In many instances, portability had to be sold to us. For instance, Kodak labored for years, early in the twentieth century, to transform photography into a quotidian practice, partly by celebrating the camera’s portability. Building on the device’s functionality as a professional apparatus and also a special-occasion gadget (to be tucked away in a closet), Kodak normalized picture taking and its cameras through elaborate marketing and public relations efforts, resulting infamously in the idea of photography as a “point-and-shoot” convenience. As early as 1895, the company offered a “Pocket Kodak,” with campaigns rolled out over the subsequent decades encouraging people to think about their cameras whenever they moved about. In 1908 the company implored the American public to: “Take a Kodak with you.” There was no particular destination or event specified. What they were selling was a new kind of disposition in the world, one that entailed carrying a camera wherever you went. Kodak should go too!39 To ease people into this, Kodak designed pink, blue, and leather-bound devices to match handbags and suit jackets, with advertisements that featured boys waiting at train stations and girls shopping in the city holding cameras. These were not just picture-taking devices but little optical-mechanical wonders interwoven with our increasingly mobile, modern selves that in Kodak’s eyes inhabited a world reconceptualized as eminently and perpetually photographable.40 Taking pictures is but one well-known function of a portable media device. Almost half a century after Kodak’s efforts, RCA commissioned studies in the 1940s to pursue what was then a perplexing proposition: would anyone ever want to listen to music while walking? Listening and walking? It seemed to some sheer lunacy. If not, then what would a portable radio look like? How would it be carried? The resulting discussion shifted radio away from the tabletop and console models for living room use and toward a more embodied, personal sound machine that went with us in the world. This became a widespread reality throughout the 1950s with the rise of lightweight transistor radios.41 So some media began as highly stationary or immobile and then grew legs. Still others have been portable in a physical sense for centuries, like most printed books or maps. Of course, these same objects might become categorically unportable as they age and their value transforms over time. Consider the forty-nine remaining copies of the Gutenberg Bible, historically important as a powerful consort between Christianity and technology. Hundreds of years ago, a new print industry began to reproduce the Bible using moveable typeface (printing press), making sacred texts and their interpretation available beyond elite church enclaves and purchasable at first by wealthy buyers,

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and then eventually by many. Today, the first mechanically reproduced Bible is no longer a living experiment in radical accessibility but is instead a priceless auratic object, housed in rare books collections in libraries, museums, and archives with highly limited access and climate-controlled protection. It has, in a sense, been re-sacralized. Or, think about a painting like the Mona Lisa, which is relatively small (thirty by twenty-one inches) and light in weight yet fundamentally immovable. The diminutive portrait defies known systems of monetary value and as such is encumbered by complex insurance regimes. It is further weighed down by a building (Louvre), an institutional apparatus (museum), and national pride. More concretely, the painting has also been housed in a frame and security box that weighs roughly two hundred pounds. Protocols and practices predicated on scarcity and uniqueness provide an instructive counterpoint to any simple conceptualization of portability as progressive or democratic. Lisa Gitelman argues that to think of media as historical subjects entails tending to their “protocols and practices”—that is, the shifting rules and conventions that shape not only the hardware but also the applications, aesthetics, goals, and rituals of media conceived as cultural and social phenomena.42 Using Gitelman, we can also think about portable media as clusters of technologies, audio and visual content, practices, and also rules and procedures issued by institutions. Most important here is to recognize that portability is not simply a physical property or an immanent feature. It is inescapably historical, made and remade within conditions that are never simply the result of human agency or technologically determinist forces but also the social and cultural factors that make specific media meaningful. This book strives to identify and discuss what protocols and practices enabled and shaped the spread of small portable projectors, attending to the institutional and cultural dynamics in which moving-image portability became legible across a differentiated field. Addressing portable projectors as separate from lightweight and handheld cameras will seem unorthodox to those familiar with the history of small-gauge cinema, which by and large has focused on marginalized and minoritarian modes of filmmaking. To be sure, portable cameras have been significant enablers of exceptional and important film movements. Amateur, home movie, experimental, and political filmmaking were each linked in one way or another to the capacities of lightweight cameras as early as the 1920s.43 For decades these gauges have inspired numerous manifestoes, declaring small film machines essential tools in a plethora of urgent social, artistic, and political projects.44 The specific ideals of the 16 mm handheld camera, with its romantic, artisanal connotations of a corporate machine

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turned into an artist’s tool made a lasting impact and are typified by Alexandre Astruc’s canonical essay “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: A Caméra Stylo,” first published in 1948.45 In this essay, Astruc asserts that in the immediate postwar period, film was becoming a new and important language. Throughout the 1950s, innovative and distinct film languages did emerge, among them movements of nonfictional and documentary cinema, most notably direct cinema and cinéma vérité, which turned lightweight camera and sound recording equipment into a virtue of bottom-up, authentic, and immediate storytelling.46 Small-gauge cameras were also instrumental in the United States for the rise of New American and underground cinema in the late 1950s and 1960s, supported by such journals as Jonas Mekas’s Film Culture, multimedia art publications like Aspen, and the art practices of figures like Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Hollis Frampton, Andy Warhol, and Ken Jacobs, as well as the multimedia artists working under the rubric of the Fluxus movement, such as Nam Jun Paik and Yoko Ono.47 For all of these artists and their movements, 16 mm and 8 mm film technologies played indispensible roles. Many additional artists, some of whom can be grouped under the rubric of expanded cinema, a term coined by Gene Youngblood, sought to combine experimental forms with new kinds of environmental film projection, undergirded by new visions of global villages and interconnected, sometimes cosmic, consciousness.48 Collectively, such modes rejected the commercial theater categorically and instead proposed that cinema should come in all shapes and sizes, and be everywhere. The anti-Hollywood ideals of small-gauge film work were further secured with Lenny Lipton’s influential 1972 book Independent Filmmaking, which inspired a generation of would-be filmmakers looking back and ahead to a world torn asunder by what was seen as a radical new means of expression and media making, one that preceded but also paralleled the rise of the camcorder.49 Much like the preceding experimental modes, independent filmmaking forcefully rejected corporate, industrial models. Small technologies of cinema helped to create new ecosystems of film and media art, playing a particularly influential role in the so-called art world. This fact has been addressed in a recent and sizable body of scholarship with key works by Ji-Hoon Kim, Noam Elcott, Pavle Levi, Andrew Uroskie, and Erika Balsom.50 These scholars, among others, have emphasized the ways in which art has served as a disarticulating force, critical of dominant modes of theatrical cinema and a homeostatic, normative apparatus.51 Such work taps into artistic and intellectual avant-gardes as a vital family of ideas and practices that improve our understanding of cinema’s capacities beyond the movie theater.

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Everyday Movies similarly pursues histories of an expanded film apparatus. However, it does so by considering a somewhat obscured thread of what visionaries like Astruc were calling forth. In addition to declaring that small-gauge film technologies were becoming a new kind of art and language, Astruc also predicted that “everyone will possess a projector” and that a vast array of films would be available: literary criticism, history, mathematics, science.52 Astruc’s caméra-stylo was intimately connected to a correlate and essential viewing apparatus, one that was widely available, multifunctional, and easy to use. Astruc hence not only connected the avant-garde filmmaker to a radical new language but also to a common sense about affordable, everyday film projection. His was a blossoming cluster of ideas about what projected moving images could do and where they could be found, including the basic assertion that radical films and experimental films also needed to be seen and not only made. Indeed, such calls can be heard throughout film and media history and precede Astruc, populating the writing of film theorists, artists, critics, and cinephiles, as well as community organizers, educators, amateurs, engineers, and industrialists of the 1920s and 1930s. Long before the war, key figures in the documentary movement, such as John Grierson, declared in 1935: “As I see it, the future of the cinema may not be in the cinema at all.”53 Publishing in modernist journals like Close Up, amateur magazines such as Movie Makers, and middlebrow publications such as the American National Board of Review Magazine, poets such as H.D. and socialist activists such as Harry Alan Potamkin, issued similar calls.54 Some were primarily motivated by the desire to experience films that more closely reflected or even stimulated their political or aesthetic avant-gardism. Some simply wanted to see movies they chose to see and could project under conditions of their own design. Others wanted to diversify filmmaking, rightly reasoning that to stimulate the evolution of an art form or realize better movies, one needed to be able to view them and create an environment conducive to study, discussion, and debate.55 The chapters that follow take up these calls and pursue the implications of portable film projection and its dynamics, demonstrating that this discussion has in fact been central to cinema’s long history as a dispersed cultural form. In doing so, I suggest that what Astruc called “avant-garde” film in 1948 and what came to be called “experimental,” “underground,” and “expanded” film in subsequent decades were themselves appropriations and reformulations of portability’s growing and widespread functions and capacities across more mundane spheres. As such, this book details parallel and preceding efforts to open up what film and film technologies could be, documenting partly

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what they have, in fact, undeniably been. Under the banner of experiment and expansion, the chapters in this book explore such phenomena but in more commonplace and broadly influential venues and contexts than those of the avant-garde. Following portable projectors entails recognizing that such machines were easily adapted to multiple purposes and that aspects of their avant-gardist operations are sometimes difficult to disentangle from their innovative but also workaday-functions in highly mainstream and institutional contexts. Self-operation and programmability are fundamental capacities ushered in by portable projectors during the period under examination. But rather than explore the ways in which these new machines fed a romanticized individualism or even countercultural programming ethos radically opposed to the faceless mass commercial Hollywood cinema, Everyday Movies focuses on the ways in which the projector itself was the product of a complex film and technology industry. Projectors were modern machines, intimately connected to the rise of the American military, government propaganda, and industrial media and display practices, as well as to other technologies, including electrical appliances and mantras of convenience and automation. Projectors were quickly put to use by institutions and organizations that effectively normalized the place of moving images in realms of work, business, research, government, national security, and war. This story is not meant to utterly upend the democratic importance of portable media machines and the ways they have been put to alternative artistic and critical ends. But what follows does demonstrate the ways in which principles of adaptability and the apparatus’s elasticity yielded a plethora of uses, including those linked to authoritative, centralized, and powerful organizations and institutions.

Film as Media Thinking about the projector as a performance tool, a display mechanism, a playback machine, a decompressor of content, an image-enlarger, a sound amplifier, a recording device, and an audiovisual interface carries far richer interpretive possibilities than thinking about it as the poor cousin of the movie theater. It also helps us to explain more about why film has long mattered across many realms of cultural and institutional activity. Critically shifting how we conceptualize what a projector is and does opens a window to a wider array of other media devices that performed the work of storing, decompressing, and yielding content, as well as interfacing with users, viewers, and analysts. Drawing on innovations in precision mechanics,

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chemistry, optics, and electrical and eventually acoustic and magnetic engineering, projectors catalyzed alternate ways of presenting recorded images and sounds, converting celluloid and its otherwise indecipherable inscriptions into visible and audible content, usable data, productive lessons, and persuasive messaging. In doing so they shaped performance and presentation for audiences of various sizes, replaying prerecorded content but also often transforming that content into hybrid scenarios, including live accompaniment, conversation, and lectures. Many projectors were dynamic media machines. They facilitated new patterns of circulation, programming, borrowing, and showing that could completely rework the logics or intentions of a primary filmmaker, producer, or distributor. Beyond controlling or simply adjusting the speed, brightness, volume, and size of an image, many projectors empowered you to stop a film and watch it again and again, creating the conditions for widespread practices that are common sense today, but then were not.56 Consider the difference between extensive viewing (seeing many titles) and intensive viewing (seeing one title many times). Both were made more possible for moving images with the spread of portable projectors. These functions had analogies in other media devices, in particular books and phonographs, which changed reading and listening respectively. Both led to libraries of content that increased access, enabling repetition and engagement at different intervals and intensities. Contrary to portable film scenarios, the commercial, theatrical conditions of film viewing were largely subordinated to the logics of professional making, distribution, and programming: the latest films, the biggest stars, the largest audiences. Portable projectors created the conditions for a new kind of spectating, permitting repeat, slow, or close-viewing in ways that were previously impossible for the vast majority of movie watchers.57 Recent scholarship has emphasized the shifting, provisional, and contingent aspects of media history, highlighting the problems created when a historically specific iteration of a medium is taken as an ahistorical or ontological necessity. To illustrate, it no longer makes sense to theorize television as essentially live or broadcast, because television today is nonsynchronous, archival, and increasingly digital.58 This project is built on the assumption that theatrical iterations of cinema were not absolute necessities or inevitable ideals. Rather, they are but one film format—albeit powerful and seductive. Portability groups together film machines that are missed when theaters are normatively presumed to be the primary and de facto setting for cinema. A foundational quality, portability conjoins several formats (16 mm, 8 mm, 9.5 mm) that have shared properties, distinguishing

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them from theatrical forms. Jonathan Sterne suggests that formats are specific iterations of broader media categories and as such can help us to better understand the technological, institutional, and cultural dynamics that convene to create specific technological iterations or coherences in history.59 In this book, I assert that cinema is a term that could benefit from a little formatting in order to imbue our histories and theories of moving images with greater precision and acuity across time and geopolitical boundaries. In focusing on portable projectors, I am building on arguments about a broadened approach to cinema, treating it not as a singular and unchanging apparatus but rather as one that is iterative and that has achieved degrees of coherence at observable phases in history. That is, I join a growing chorus of scholars of film and media history who have productively disarticulated the seemingly coherent cinematic apparatus, mapping its many iterations across a widening array of social and cultural phenomena.60 Thus, what follows demonstrates another approach to a particularly widespread, enduring but unknown family of dispositifs that persisted across diverse locations, constituted by somewhat shifting assemblages of technologies and techniques. Portable devices were an especially influential confluence of protocols, practices, and specific institutional dynamics. Everyday Movies shows that the paradigms and practices of art have no monopoly on experimentation and innovation. Cinema’s apparatus has been disrupted, played with, and remade in venues that have heretofore gone underexamined and have thrived without art as a primary imperative. Underpinning this project most directly is the increasing body of scholarship that presupposes cinema’s appropriation by a host of institutions, in which it has been made useful in the service of diverse imperatives. A good deal of this work focuses on broader rubrics such as educational, governmental, scientific, medical, or industrial uses of film, examining these areas, their films, and the meanings and uses made of them.61 Everyday Movies contributes to this scholarship by focusing on the shared technical base that linked these seemingly irreconcilable areas and enabled this diversity of film form and function in the first place. More and more work about cinema beyond American borders is revealing multiple articulations, with movies happening in wide-ranging scenarios, aided and abetted by changing technological, cultural, and sociopolitical dynamics. Scholarship addressing Cuba, India, China, Africa, Thailand, and international bodies such as the United Nations, are informing us of the fact that American cinema’s dominant iteration as an industrial, theatrical form has obscured the multiplicity of ways in which moving images, sounds, and audiovisual texts have operated throughout their

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long and international history.62 Building on this insight, what follows asserts that the so-called apparatus of cinema has always been played with, pushed against, and rearticulated on a shifting terrain of steady technological, institutional, and cultural change, even in its most dominant cultural contexts. This book examines the realms wherein cultural, industrial, and military imperatives worked to ensure the fundamental place of moving images in experimenting and expanding with the meaning and function of projected light, malleable images, and screened sounds in the United States. It asserts that the ability to see films, fundamentally changed by portable projectors, paved the ground for and normalized the place of programmable images and sounds in our contemporary everyday media ecosystems.

Key Terms and Methodological Notes As other scholars have observed, the idea that cinema can be understood as a singular apparatus, enshrined in what is referred to as “apparatus theory,” has flattened the historical dynamics of cinema specifically and projected images and sounds more generally. But so too have a whole series of other assumptions that have guided our understanding of the medium and its legacies. Among them and already mentioned is the place of theaters in histories of cinema, a place that was by no means simple.63 Scholarship produced recently has convincingly charted the importance and complexity of the movie theater.64 Yet this does not always serve our fullest assessment of cinema and media history, nor does it helps us to gain distance from the theater’s tenacious hold even on more basic terminology. For instance, consider the semantic slippage of the term cinema, which is often used to name a site, cultural text, and experience. Furthermore, the terms for a theater (the site) and the apparatus (camera, film, and viewing scenario) are frequently the same term: cinema. In North America, one “goes to the movies” as much as one “watches movies.” In the United Kingdom, you “go to the cinema” as much as “watch cinema.” Similar ambiguities exist in Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German, a point made by scholars as different as Lee Grieveson and Gabriele Pedullà.65 With recent changes in viewing conditions, many identify this as an outdated tendency; moving images today are watched across many locations and on many platforms. Of course, language is sticky. Such slippages persist nonetheless, having taken hold of the most basic terms we use to talk about film and its institutions as well as its histories. This book does not argue against the theater, its importance, its appeals, or its complexities. It does work, however, to

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denaturalize the theater as the de facto, enduring, and natural site of film across history and not just in the early or contemporary periods. Examining film projectors and the ways they have been configured and used requires attention to the limits of received terminology and basic concepts in film and media studies, some of which inevitably embody the biases of what we accept as common knowledge. For example, film exhibition is a foundational term that names a particular arm of the film industry and the site wherein a film-in-a-can turns into a social and often commercial event. Yet the same phrase is frequently used to name all manner of film performance, such that you exhibit films in a basement, on a boat, or at a battlefront, rather than “show” them or “present” them or just “run” them. Other media have their own words to indicate when they are operating: a radio or a television might be “turned on.” You might “play” music on a home stereo unit. In this book, I have worked to devise more precise ways of talking about the running of celluloid through a projector: film performance, film display, or just plain old projection. By and large, I will use the term film exhibition to refer to the commercial or professionalized programming of films in theaters or venues dedicated to showing film, wherein seeing films from beginning to end was part of a commercial transaction or a purposefully conceived show and was the primary purpose for gathering. Here the term film exhibition maintains a degree of formal intentionality. Throughout, I maintain that not all projection is best understood with the term exhibition. One of the interesting problems that results from the privileged place of theaters in film history is the awkward search for terms to name film phenomena that happened everywhere else. The term nontheatrical has persisted and is commonly used to name all manner of film types as well as performance venues that were not theaters. This unfortunate development has the odd effect of taking a term that was used in history by particular people or organizations to name something specific but then elevates it to a metahistorical category, and a confusing one at that. Does it refer to a genre of film? A location? A function? It also frames an overwhelming majoritarian cultural and technological development in the negative (nontheatrical) and as an aberrance, the inverse mirror of the idealized theatrical standard. It marks as an absence or nonentity what is in fact a plenitude. Overreliance on the term nontheatrical also burdens the emergent with the weight of what came before. It would be like calling a radio nonphonographic, or a cellphone nontelephonic, further mistaking a specific institutional and technological iteration for an ontological or transhistorical fact. At the same time, it naturalizes a particular hierarchy. Our language can easily obscure the adaptations and

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transformations of the things it seeks to name and thus perpetuate biases we should be critically identifying and assessing rather than simply reaffirming. It is essential that we find more productive terms to capture the diversity and persistence of film’s widespread formal innovations and uses as well as the implications of its iterative forms in a vast number of institutions, organizations, and projects. In this book, I will confine my use of the term nontheatrical to identify historically specific phenomena that were named as such by institutional actors and entities, usually to distinguish location, sponsoring agent, and type of film from Hollywood norms.66 Everyday Movies asserts that film has long been an iterative apparatus with coherences and disruptions that are historical and dynamic and that can be traced well beyond the darkened cave of the movie theater. It argues that as we assess the implications of this changing and shifting apparatus, we have much to gain by setting aside the normative and prescriptive ideal of what cinema could have or should have been. Rather, we can focus on what film actually has been. It takes up calls made by media historians such as Lisa Gitelman, who assert that media-in-history are best understood as shifting assemblages of technologies, protocols, and practices for which change is neither linear nor uniform through time and across contexts.67 Echoes can be heard in the writing of such scholars as William Uricchio, Thomas Elsaesser, Lynn Spigel, and Anna McCarthy, who ask us to tend to the multiplicities and hybridity in film and media history and to seek out the things we can learn by veering away from inherited linearities and toward underexamined phenomena that constitute film and media history.68 It does so in the spirit of capturing the complexity and power of film as a medium, as a family of formats, as a shifting assemblage of varying components, and as a technological and cultural form that has exercised significant influence on how meaning is made, how experiences are brokered, and how we see and hear. This book documents the relevance of this approach for both the past and present by examining an enlarged set of institutions and practices. In doing so, I argue that we are not only better able to comprehend the multiple paths that moving-image technologies have traveled as purveyors of realism and immersive experiences, but to accept projectors as flexible tools persistently reimagined and instrumentalized toward a vast range of aesthetic, functional, and experiential modes. Everyday Movies adamantly inserts cinema history into media history, helping us to view the rhetorics of so-called new media with more nuance and assisting us to better assess media change and settlement across analogue and digital worlds. Rather than foreground improvements in clarity, crispness, brightness, immersion, spectacle, or fidelity, the case studies that follow document

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the grainy, the dull, the dim, the scratchy, and often unpleasant audile distortion. The goal is not to celebrate these things but to demonstrate their determined place in media history, documenting the ways in which other qualities of cinema were deemed far more important than pristine aesthetics: ease of use; adaptability; affordability; access; programmability; durability; and control of speed, size, and volume. This is not a story that emphasizes newness or radical change but rather maps a technology—like many others—that emerged over decades and rose not on a single revolutionary manifesto but most dramatically through industrial and military need. Portable film projectors were devices that, unlike radio and television, you could fill with content and choose to play at a particular time and location. This involved film in a specific kind of programming and performance dynamic distinct from other contemporary so-called mass media. Many of the cases studies that I discuss here were intimately linked to institutions other than Hollywood, and exhibition and performance scenarios that only sometimes had the watching of movies as their primary purpose. More frequently, I analyze projections chosen to demonstrate industrial wonder, to display products, to service military operations, or to facilitate everyday media interfaces. Occasionally, I consider particular kinds of films that were very specific and perhaps short-lived: looped poster films, retail display films, airplane instrumentation records, mapping surveys, industrial exhibition films, interlude and ambient films. Some of these have links to more familiar genres like documentary, industrial and training films, and feature films that will also be addressed. Indeed, sometimes I examine applications of film stock that do not readily fall under the category of “film” and whose viewing would better be called reviewing, scanning, and glimpsing, rather than watching or spectating. Overall, the chapters focus on projectors and their capacities as playback machines, adaptable performance devices, and institutional tools, situating them within a broader film and media history. This project continues recent work documenting and theorizing the place of technologies in transforming the conditions under which films are seen, opening up dialogue about informal, gray, and black media ecologies in the United States before the rise of video. I am asserting alongside scholars of film and media exhibition and distribution that the ways in which films travel, circulate, and appear play an important role in why and how they are important. Expanded viewing apparatuses have not just shaped how audiovisual content moves but have also galvanized the making and circulation of a vast body of content. Such technological dynamics have therefore transfigured the functions and uses of moving images and

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sounds as well. That films could be shown and seen is clearly a basic precondition for films to be understood as practical and plausible and perhaps also compelling, expressive, and communicative forms. The printing press would have been significantly diminished as a force if its products could only be read in particular buildings or with the permission of particular institutions; wax cylinders or vinyl disks or magnetic tape became very different phenomena with the spread of affordable ways for people to make them audible. Recording and storage devices have no doubt played significant roles in all manner of historically significant change. Moreover, the ability to play back widely that which has been recorded and stored must equally be acknowledged as fundamental to understanding the aesthetic, social, and cultural impact of film as an expressive form, consumer gadget, or convenient device. The portable projector was an essential element of how moving images became more widely watchable and hence basic to mediated life.

Chapter Overview Everyday Movies focuses on the period from 1916 to 1958, the year that the federal government passed the National Defense Education Act. This legislation marks the point when portable film projectors (among many other small-media technologies) gained clear recognition as powerful tools and were tasked with an important strategic Cold War function: educating American children in the name of national defense. After this, film and media secured a place as recognized instruments of learning, citizenship, nationalism, and security—all part of a high-stakes and well-funded political imperative at midcentury. Akin to contemporary calls to equip all children with their own laptop, enshrining portable projectors in high-stakes public policy is a profoundly normalizing act. It punctuates decades of growth and catalyzed subsequent developments that no doubt future work will address. To chart this rise, chapter 1 traces the standardization of portability in relation to film projection by the technical wing of the American film industry and examines the debates and dynamics that informed those definitions. Chapter 2 explores the use of portable devices at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, situating film within the broader exhibition environment of the 1930s. Led by a new generation of public relations experts and industrial designers, it documents the evolution of industrial display and business and public relations films, and it unearths experiments with small and expanded film screens. Chapter 3 then addresses the American military and its rapid procurement and use of film projectors in response to its

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vast mobilization effort during World War II, mapping the normalization of filmmaking and film watching within a global, diversified, and notably powerful institution. This chapter demonstrates the plain alignment of film technologies with other industrial and military technologies as indices to advanced technological progress. Under the imperatives of the US military, film projectors became rugged fighting machines, enlisted not just for entertainment but for military needs. Modes of filmmaking and watching diversified and proliferated, many tethered to the exigencies of war and its techno-industrial transformation of everything from the benign, like enabling prayer or healing the sick, to the horrific, like dropping bombs. Chapter 4 then considers the postwar environment in which portable projectors (16  mm and 8  mm) became accessible and omnipresent gadgets, ascending alongside the rise of television and proliferating despite the decline of theatrical movie screens in the United States. In particular, chapter 4 illustrates some of the postwar euphoria that fueled the spread of film technologies in everyday life. The easy imbrications specifically of film projection with the electronic ethos we frequently associate with radio and television also rise to the fore. Lastly, this chapter describes three categories of film projectors, carving up the vast sea of millions that constituted the field of portable projection after the war: mass market projectors, analytic projectors, and magnetic projectors. While mass market projectors continued familiar discourses of convenience, ease of use, lightness of weight, and affordability, these other kinds of projectors embodied very different principles. Analytic projectors were precision machines largely created as time-motion devices, applied to specialized research and presentation scenarios, offering a high degree of control over the speed of image movement. Magnetic projectors afforded a projectionist the opportunity to play and also record synchronous (or nonsynchronous) sound with moving images. Thus, the projector became a tool of making and remaking, augmenting decades of complex sound dynamics that undergird the development of portable projectors. The epilogue provides a summary of the book’s primary arguments and insights, suggesting paths for future work. Everyday Movies unearths the relationships among film technologies and the broader cultural field of activities that made moving images into common components of expression, congregation, and interface with the world. The following chapters assert that portability is a foundational concept for film and media historiography that uncovers an enduring, visible, and formative category of film technology, filmmaking, and film viewing. It also reveals the proliferation, integration, and institutionalization of film into everyday media ecologies.

1. Engineering Portability The Rise of Suitcase Cinema Small wonder that a number of manufacturers, in their eagerness to meet the uncompromising public demand, are supplying portable projectors disguised as sample cases, lunch boxes and violin cases. What cannot be done with safety, according to official requirements, is always accomplished by stealth. Alexander Victor, “The Portable Projector: Its Present Status and Needs,” 1918

Few consider movie theaters as impediments to cinema’s vitality. Quite the contrary, the theater has long been the privileged and often idealized site for understanding the specificities of cinema, whether conceived as a mass medium, a popular commercial form, or as art.1 It occupies an essential place in histories of the growing and powerful film industry, changing leisure patterns, and aesthetic ideals. The centrality of the picture house is further demonstrated by its sometimes quiet but steady presence in theories of film that seek to assess the ways that projected moving images make us think, feel, desire, and experience.2 We often simply assume that throughout the twentieth century, movies happened in theaters. There are many good reasons for this. Movie theaters have long provided a powerful and dominant stage for the encounter between moving images and those who watch them; between an industry and its paying customers; between artists and their interlocutors. Yet I contend that the theater remains a rather curious institution, an unlikely flagship for a cultural form heralded as defiantly mobile, malleable, reproducible, and accessible. When compared to the venues that typify the “fine arts” such as the stately art museum or the grand opera house, movie theaters are indeed relatively affordable and predicated on the far more democratic ideals of an inclusive, polyglot, popular culture. Seen from the perspectives of print or sound cultures, the theater exercises a strangely tenacious restraint on the circulation, access, and use of moving images. It is, after all, an immobile, brick-and-mortar, professionalized venue that was precisely designed to direct and otherwise contain the wily logics of easily portable film prints. Theaters operate on 37

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fixed schedules and in specific locations. Management teams decide what will be shown and for how long. In contrast to the innumerable viewing scenarios that offer significant choice over not just when or what we watch but also how we watch, theaters have steadfastly hosted efforts to control or at least delimit the behavior of those watching. From today’s purview, the movie theater can easily seem like a weighty anachronism. Incongruous with the immobility of the movie theater, portability— while largely a neglected term—allows us to see the ways that many technological, legal, and cultural practices have come together to shape a very different kind of cinema. In the most general sense, the term indexes a paradigmatic quality of twentieth century media. Portability refers to a set of foundational capacities that transformed both recording and playback devices and thus affected the ways in which words, sounds, and images have been inscribed, stored, and then circulated and accessed. Portable media have undeniably had an impact on what are variously called reading, looking, listening, playing, and making.3 The case of portable film projection is but one example of this complex history. Focusing on portable projectors specifically enables us to discover cinema’s similarities to other media technologies, particularly those that severed making and inscription from watching and listening. Like the printing press and the distributive function of paper, or the television set and its electronic signals, camera, projector, and celluloid have endured as essential elements of a complex system whereby pictures of the world were made in one place and then traveled to various sites to be brought to life again by viewers, listeners, and often an audience. For films, this entailed special technical processes, including amplification, illumination, and enlargement, as well as techniques of performance, all transpiring somewhere other than the locations of initial recording and independent of the creative intentions of a camera operator or director. Making movies is one thing; showing them and watching them have persistently been part of dedicated presentation and viewing platforms. Highly varied interfaces or performance scenarios have long connected dispersed audiences to a multitude of technologically mediated encounters that might be entertaining, spectacular, wondrous, educational, governmental, or artistic; sometimes, they might be all of these at once. This chapter shows that as movie theaters rose to become the American film industry’s primary retail outpost, the ideals, practices, and technological capacities of a distinct and portable film-viewing apparatus persisted alongside the theater’s centrality and the vertically integrated business model adopted by the studios. Film projection technologies intended for use far beyond the movie theater were not primarily conceived as oppositional

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to the theater; they emerged more as distinct and complementary formats. Moreover, the fact of cinema’s portability initially evolved not as part of a renegade, radical, anticorporate impetus or as a technological aberrance to a widely accepted natural technological ideal. Rather, it arose at the behest of a maturing industry, reconceived here not simply as the film studios but more broadly as the family of technological and industrial concerns that collectively supported cinema’s rise. Portability in film history has largely been discussed through the lens of minoritarian filmmaking—in particular, under the category of amateurism.4 Yet the association of small-gauge technologies with amateur and hobbyist filmmaking has effectively distracted us from a far more important set of phenomena. If we reframe small-gauge machines to align with a broader imperative to portability—in making and more importantly showing films—then we can see how the drive to create the technological conditions for this other kind of cinema was expansive and taking place in the light of day. Amateurism and hobbyism were but one part of this transformation toward crafting cinema technologies as everyday machines, integral to a new understanding about the use of moving images in business, military, industry, science, and more. In the early decades of the century, Hollywood’s engineers beheld a powerful vision of a dynamic, adaptable apparatus, amply evident in the bulletins and journals documenting their society’s first and subsequent meetings across the ensuing decades. This chapter will map its evolution and institutionalization within the film industry itself. By following the publications of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE), we witness that a family of film technologies was not just being debated or manufactured but also imagined as a set of widening capacities, enlarging cinema’s applications and presence in proliferating sites. These technologies were not necessarily driven by— but did often mirror—demands from film theorists, activists, artists, civic organizers, and amateurs, many of whom were also calling for an adaptable, self-operated, nimble machine. This chapter maps the conditions in which the possibilities of portable projectors in the United States were debated and developed into enduring technological realities. It examines the discourses that shaped portable projectors’ technological and cultural capacities as they became standardized, normalized, and deeply institutionalized within the workings of the film business, capaciously conceived. How the term portable became meaningful and codified within the context of commercial cinema’s rise will be foregrounded. Here the seemingly oppositional model of theatrical film exhibition and the concurrent growth of sizable movie theaters will provide

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key contextual factors. Throughout, qualities such as lightness of weight, ease of use, adaptability, and control of the projected image will be shown to be primary factors in design, engineering, and marketing discourses pertaining to portability. But above all, and perhaps surprisingly, flammability is revealed as the most dangerous and hence instrumental of all variables. That is, “not catching fire” became a primary quality defining and enabling portability’s rise, differentiating it from the commercial movie theater. The long-standing threat of fire in theatrical scenarios also helps to distill cinema’s portable viewing apparatus from the swell of regulations that had evolved to govern the brick-and-mortar film show and to dictate where industry films could be shown: only in safe and sanctioned locations. Subtended not only by factors such as weight and size but also by chemical and electrical innovations, portability proved a powerful workaround for all manner of architectural and regulatory heft. The dangers of flammable nitrate film stock are familiar in film history. Fires feed cinema’s infamy. From its emergence and into the early 1950s, film stock, a type of celluloid, was comprised of volatile chemicals that were highly combustible. Though public and regulatory outcry over these dangers persisted for decades, the industry delayed the transition to nonflammable acetate stock until 1951. Many reasons for this were provided over the years, such as nitrate’s cost efficiencies and its superior quality compared to nonflammable alternatives. Nitrate proponents also frequently claimed it was perfectly safe if properly used: its risk, they argued, was worth its reward. Thus, for more than half a century, film fires posed a threat both to public safety and just about all other operations involving nitrate stock: filmmaking, film storage, film distribution and transport.5 This makes electrochemistry a defining feature not just of film’s technical qualities but also its sociocultural manifestations, as what was termed public safety became one of the primary strategic frameworks for regulating film performance. Theaters were natural settings for the rehearsal of these concerns given their permanent and visible status and their function as places of gathering. With regard to portability specifically, the threat of fire became especially significant as flammability was made more likely when film shows moved about and had to adapt to constantly changing and perhaps unpredictable projection environments that could involve poor ventilation or cramped spaces. An accessible and adaptable apparatus also invited a wider array of untrained operators, who might lack the adequate experience to ensure safety. The design imperative to make the projector smaller also led to the practical challenges of controlling the potential danger of heat inside the lamphouse. That is, the smaller that little metal box was, the

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hotter it became. The hotter it ran, the more incendiary it was. Calls to make bigger and brighter images, requiring stronger and hence hotter bulbs, only exacerbated the problem. Demands to still the moving image presented a vexing challenge, given that this required holding a single illuminated film frame steady rather than moving it quickly in and out of the heat created by the process of projection. With nitrate this led quickly to one thing: fire. Movement was a bias of illuminated nitrate film stock, making motion safer than stasis. In order to chart the ways in which portability was defined and became a part of a surprisingly diverse and productive discussion about film technologies, this chapter focuses on the 1910s and 1920s as a critical period for the consolidation of lasting definitions and ideas about portability and projection. It examines the ways in which technical capacities interfaced with industrial, cultural, and aesthetic ones. What follows documents the ways in which portability was defined and standardized by the SMPE, examining the parallel development of small-gauge, portable equipment alongside the contrasting growth in theater size and complexity. Big and small cinema evolved side by side as complementary products of industry consolidation, rationalization, and expansion. Far from an anti-Hollywood proposition, portable film projectors, like their seeming opposite—the picture palace—signaled an effort to improve the experience and application of moving image technologies in general, and technologies of projection in particular. Such diversification benefitted Hollywood to a degree but more so the archipelago of companies that constituted its technical base. Portability can be understood here as an organizational principle and a growth imperative, one that would especially help to tap into vast, undiscovered markets. This imperative manifested both in the standardization of particular small-gauge film systems and as a way of thinking about multiplying uses. Resonating with the fervor that typically accompanies so-called new media, discourses about portable film projectors crystallized appeals to a diversifying set of purposes for cinema. Indeed, this would lead to more customers and to normalizing a new conception of modern life: moving images and sounds should be everyday, essential media.

The Roots of Portable Cinema Cinema was born portable, moving from showplace to stage to fair. As in many countries around the world, American cinema began as inexpensive public amusements and complements to other presentation and performance modes: educational lectures, industrial display, religious sermons.

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In one sense, it was the PowerPoint of its day. Itinerant showmen, traveling lecturers, and touring entertainment troupes frequently projected films. The machines and movies that constituted cinema’s earliest attractions had no single home and no dedicated architectural element integral to them. In the United States, it took a decade for devoted cinema spaces to open up. By 1905, the first storefront theaters appeared in cities and continued to include a mix of live and recorded shows with numerous sound devices (recorded, instrumental, and live) and varied modes of patron address. Spanning sidewalk barkers, painted posters, and automated announcements, these first theaters were not so much exclusively dedicated to movies as they were wrapped around a business model featuring movies at their core. Seeing a film entailed a broad spectrum of other media and presentational modes; from early on, cinema was an indisputably multimedia event.6 By 1915, movie theaters were proliferating, establishing a recognizable genre of public entertainment, and serving as the retail face of the American film industry. Among their important functions, they provided reliable sales windows for studio products. Stabilizing the theater as the point-ofsale for movies allowed the industry to secure market share in a rising entertainment industry. Theaters ensured an outlet for their products and provided a predictable and appealing site for repeat customers. The larger purpose-built theaters that subsequently emerged gradually formed into the regional and national chains essential to the American film business and its transformation into the powerful conglomerates we name with the umbrella term Hollywood. Equally important to the success of theaters was the standardization and control of film technologies that included the highly flammable 35  mm film stock, secured as the dominant and professional film gauge when the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) formed in 1908. This so-called trust was comprised of key companies such as the Edison Manufacturing Company, American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, Vitagraph Company of America, and Eastman Kodak. The MPPC secured control of distribution and exhibition largely through its technology patents and aggressive litigation protecting the same. Even as the business of film and its technical base solidified, the place of film in a line of other venues beyond the movie theater persisted. Projectors were, in other words, still made to be moved, but usually by professionals. Through the rubric of itinerancy, such performers continued to nurture cinema as a local rather than centralized phenomenon well beyond the early and silent phases of film’s history.7 Concurrently, at least two dozen alternative portable projectors designed for home and small-group use were marketed between 1896 and 1923.8 Some of these devices operated

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with flammable film stock while others relied on nonflammable film stock. Flammable or not, many grand announcements heralded the spread of film technologies to all aspects of contemporary life during this period. Predicting that every home would have a film machine and that moving pictures would be everyday sources of news, information, and familial intercourse, pundits also declared that someday film would convey both sounds and images simultaneously from anywhere to everywhere.9 Some early prognostications regarding film were plainly calling for what we used to call television and now call the World Wide Web and the internet. These early machines index an ongoing dialogue about where moving images would appear, what film technologies and films would be for, and whom they would serve. Such discussions were especially vibrant throughout film’s first twenty years, though of course they have persisted to this day.10 The dangers of flammability added a perplexing layer to the task of those seeking to show movies beyond the theater’s walls. In response, a number of machines marketed as portable—engineered to be moved—appeared during this period to explicitly address concerns about safety and ease of use. The years 1911–1912 hosted an eruption of such devices, both in Europe and the United States. Prominent among formats specially designed for venues outside of the theater was Pathé’s 28 mm, released in 1911 (US availability 1913), and in operation until the mid-1920s in the United States.11 Also of note was Thomas Edison’s short-lived 22 mm gauge, launched in 1912, which projected a picture that was 2’ × 2½’.12 Both of these devices used nonflammable film, available as early as 1909. Both formats were also mainly conceived of as display devices for professional titles, reduced in size, available using either rental or subscription services.13 The Edison and the Pathé systems were both marketed as safe, easy to use, and compact. The nonflammable film also made shipping easier, as regulations against mailing volatile nitrate film did not apply. The Pathéscope, in particular, provides an interesting example of the ways that these portable machines benefitted from widespread advertising campaigns, evident in such publications as the New York Times and Saturday Evening Post, as well as National Geographic, the American School Board Journal, and the Sears catalog. In other words, the idea of safe, portable projection was not simply part of a specialist’s discourse, but readily available to American readers and consumers. By 1914, the prominent John Wannamaker’s Department Store in New York City built a model home movie salon in order to demonstrate the device and model its harmonious multifunctionality within the upscale home. The Pathéscope appeared as a “companion entertainer to the Talking Machine,” offering “movies and music (figure 7).” The department

figure 7. The Pathéscope was sold as a natural companion to the home talking machine (phonograph). It was notably not presented as a miniaturized facsimile of a professionalized movie theater. Note also that its approval as “safe” and unburdened by “insurance restrictions” by the National Board of Fire Underwriters (insurance companies) was singled out in this ad. The Talking Machine World 11, no. 2 (15 February 1915): 30. Thanks to Louis Pelletier for generously sharing this material.

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store’s auditorium also showed sample films from the Pathéscope Library, inserting them into its regular musical programming and fashion shows to promote the service. Sold expressly as educational and entertaining, the Pathéscope was a modern multipurpose machine. It was marketed as a natural learning aid, and advertisers celebrated the device’s ability to allow visual material to be studied and watched over and over again. This ability to replay films underscored the pedagogical utility of the instrument, offering wealthy users visual instruction in activities such as dancing and golf. It was thus also a means to other forms of sociality and leisure. Further, in addition to its upscale domestic applications, Pathéscope was sold for use by governments, churches, schools and universities, civic associations, agricultural groups, and business and industrial organizations. Its “light weight” of twenty-three pounds and “small suitcase” size also made it ostensibly appropriate for “the traveler.” Ad copy claimed that the machine could be used “anywhere,” indoor or out, without need for a licensed projectionist.14 Adaptable performance capacity is a prominent aspect of Pathé’s promotional literature, and affirms the thickening body of scholarship documenting that films were regularly shown in a variety of locations throughout the 1910s and 1920s.15 The importance of the Pathéscope as a device that enabled an alternate and coexisting model of film use to that of the theater was further underscored by the Pathé library of films, which were issued in conjunction with the projector. The company’s film catalogs similarly indicate its notion of a diversified viewership, featuring a sizable scope of titles including comedy, education/instruction, travel, and drama.16 Several years later, in 1922, Pathé’s 9.5 mm gauge appeared, known as the Pathébaby, which was also fed by an international library of titles.17 Pathé’s 9.5  mm gauge proved the most enduring of its small formats and played an important role in home and amateur filmmaking as well. All three of these gauges used nonflammable film, and all played prints reduced from 35 mm, making them highly relevant for histories of film distribution, presentation, and viewing.18

The Picture Palaces Portable devices did not evolve in a remote or renegade chamber of radical activity but as part of a corpulent world of consumption, affluence, and the reshaping of American leisure. Small cinema rose alongside the importance, size, grandeur, and technological complexity of the commercial movie theater. Throughout the teens, while small-gauge projectors were slowly emerging as still somewhat specialized and elite technologies, commercial

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film exhibition was changing considerably. By 1915, the multireel narrative film had become the centerpiece of the professional film show, accompanied by short films (sing-alongs, newsreels, comedies) that filled out the program. Parallel to this, purpose-built movie theaters spread in number and grew in size from the typical nickelodeon, with two hundred or fewer seats, to urban picture palaces that sat up to two thousand by mid-decade. The trend toward more and larger theaters did not eliminate other models for theatrical or itinerant film presentation, but resituated them as residual within a rapidly expanding industry. Urban environments hosted differently sized theaters. Smaller towns found ways to adapt existing spaces (opera houses, town halls) to accommodate cinema screens. Many small and midsize theaters operated continuously throughout this period. And it should be said that many theaters continued as multiuse venues, hosting live shows, community meetings, and presentations. Nonetheless, the larger and larger theater was clearly understood by the ascending film industry as the most profitable and promising path. Throughout the 1920s, theaters in general became pivotal to the consolidating industry. More and more film producers bought up distribution companies and exhibition venues; increasingly, theater owners merged with or purchased distribution and production interests. By the mid-1920s, the film industry resembled a complicated hybrid: nineteenth-century presentation models of live theater combined with the national retail model established by grocery and department store chains formed to efficiently, reliably, and regularly deliver standardized, factory-made products.19 Trends toward vertical integration became more pronounced as the decade moved on; theaters became part of a tiered exhibition system, with the largest urban venues securing first-run and A-list films and often featuring full orchestras and other live elements. These theaters also charged the highest admissions. Worn film prints and lesser titles appeared down the chain, largely moving away from urban centers and into smaller markets as time passed. This system ensured that the biggest theaters took in a disproportionate share of box office revenue. While the film industry became more vertically integrated, it is worth noting that innovations in sound and amplification technologies in the late 1920s and 1930s required partnerships with cognate entertainment industries such as recorded music, as well as large electrical conglomerates. Synchronized sound and amplification systems also interjected horizontality to film presentation and experience. While sound quality varied and many other differentiating factors remained, the largest orchestras could theoretically be heard in the smallest towns and least glamorous theaters once equipped with electrical reproduction and amplification systems. Of

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course, at the same time, sound became less local and less tied to regional performance styles, instrumentation, songs or sounds you might be familiar with, or musicians you might know.20 Before the changes to electroacoustic sound systems in the late 1920s, other slightly earlier shifts were afoot. In 1922, just months before the introduction of the 16 mm format, Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel addressed the SMPE, presenting his vision for the movie theater’s future: the gargantuan, technologically sophisticated, “atmospheric theater,” a picture palace of saturated color, deep and dynamic feeling, and all-encompassing reflective surfaces.21 Rothafel’s vision is fully discussed and contextualized in Ross Melnick’s book, American Showman, which documents the fascinating ways in which Rothafel understood his monumental theaters through a showman’s lens. Roxy’s ideas for cutting-edge theaters evolved from his career as a radio personality and live entertainer as much as a prophet of big-box cinema.22 He grounded his visions in a kind of populism, but also frequently likened the movie theater’s future to more traditional and established art forms, such as opera. He imagined these theaters as broad-scale agents of cultural change, not just elevating the experience of movies but all cultural forms, including music. Rothafel averred that the movie theater would be a catalyst for entirely new forms of entertainment. It would seat ever-mushrooming crowds, with clear sightlines for all. The new theater was not only bigger but a kind of fantastical lighting box, “made almost entirely of projected rays upon sensitized surfaces,” where an operator could orchestrate by keyboard colored lighting that amplified the orchestra’s music and the screen’s drama.23 At the time of his address to the SMPE, Rothafel ran what Melnick terms “the most lauded theater in the United States,”—the New York Capitol—largely due to the theater’s size, as well as his prudent programming choices.24 For Rothafel, the show did not begin in the camera or even on the screen but on the sidewalk, continuing through the ornate entrance, the grand foyer, and the luxurious lounges. Roxy’s vision for movie theaters grew more elaborate to include attentive service, the finest décor, and an atmosphere that distinguished picture going from other ordinary entertainments. At this point, these grand theaters also featured sizable orchestras and other live stage entertainments that might include singing and dancing. In other words, movie palaces were not just about movies. In addition to hi-tech luxury, Roxy’s theaters punctuated a decade wherein movie houses continued to get bigger. In New York this included theaters such as the Strand Theater (1914, 3,000 seats), the Rialto (1916, 2,500 seats), and the Rivoli (1917, 2,000 seats). In Chicago the Tivoli, built in

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1921, sat 3,520. Roxy’s Capitol Theater had opened in 1919 with what was then the largest seating capacity in the United States: 5,300 seats.25 In the theatrical world, size itself connoted status. The largest and most expensive theaters were frequently intended for elite cultural forms such as opera.26 Well aware of this, Rothafel continually advocated to the SMPE and others for theatrical transformation. And, in 1927, his eponymous Roxy Theater opened with 5,920 seats.27 The names given to these and smaller theaters sought to mark them as grand, luxurious, and often exotic: The Bijoux, The Imperial, The Royale. The ascendant film industry worked hard to further present palaces as the highest, most modern, sophisticated, and respected form of moviegoing.28 Lavish add-ons and signature marquees, as well as these aspirational names, all conspired to ensure that projection was but one miniscule element of an elaborate presentational apparatus. William Paul has meticulously shown that movie theaters remained varied throughout the palace phase; no single unbroken line leads from vaudeville to store-front theater to picture palaces.29 Nonetheless, palaces serviced an industry that was seeking to maximize profits in its theatrical outlets, which were differentiated by size, opulence, and geography. As theaters became bigger, accompanied by various technological developments including air conditioning, public address systems, and broadcasting (radio), they became signs of up-to-the-minute prestige. In short, the movie theater became technologically more complex and symbolically charged.30 This grand, hi-tech theatrical model also functioned as a formidable barrier to entry, further making cinema into a corporate, ritualized pageant. While picture palaces were never the most numerous type of theater they still became mastheads for the consolidating Hollywood-based companies that were buying up theaters and theater chains at the end of the 1920s, claiming ownership of what Douglas Gomery indicates was the “vast majority” of first-run movie palaces in American cities across the country.31 This gave Hollywood studios (especially Paramount, Loew’s, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, and Warner Bros.) significant control over the bulk of revenue generated by films, helping to maximize their holdings. First-run theaters allowed the major studios to more fully control where and when their films were shown, extracting the most value from their retail life.32 With the picture palace model firmly in place during the 1920s, theaters had transformed into highly technologized and mediated spaces. Film technologies, films, and their presentation serviced gargantuan, immobile, and enduring structures. They set standards that were impossible to emulate without deep capital and friendly relations with those making the shiniest films. Cinema became an industry that efficiently made (theoretically)

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infinitely reproducible copies to be distributed and shown widely and, in some instances, globally. This required the circulation of its goods to retail sites (theaters) and was predicated on a consistent flow of new, largely standardized product. However, this product was to be rented: first by the theaters who would temporarily show the film and then by viewers who paid for a seat that gave them a temporary line of sight. Movies were not typical commodities in that they were not owned by theaters or by the great growing mass of consumers. Following this logic, the theater’s screen became a hi-tech showpiece: a place to glimpse that which would momentarily appear then quickly move on. The theater acted as a kind of bulwark to the possessive impulses, ready-access, and physical intimacies that we associate with print, phonographs, photography, radios, and eventually living room television sets, video, DVD, and streaming services. Throughout the great bulk of film history, viewers did not own films; they rented an experience. In short, the grand theatrical model for cinema ritualized movies, crafting them as antithetical to the principles of immediate access, adaptability, and appropriation that characterized the use of other modern media. Film theaters may have presented a more democratized model of entertainment when compared to other live and site-specific cultural forms like opera and orchestras, but they did little that emulated the smaller, more nimble media with which they coexisted. I have gone in depth about picture palaces to illustrate the stark contrast between the forefront of commercial, theatrical exhibition and the low-tech, affordable, self-operation that characterized portable projectors. These were two notably distinct, concurrent models for cinema: hi-tech architectural monument versus inexpensive, workaday machine. The big, formidable version of cinema helps us to more plainly see what was so unusual yet also revealing about the simultaneous emergence of portable devices. While categorically different, both models grew from the technological and visionary developments enabled by Hollywood’s domestic and global success. This centralized filmmaking industry seeded a technological environment that was feeding contrasting, and some might say contradictory, models for what constituted a film show.

Engineering Portability Portable film technologies achieved their fullest impact under the umbrella of activities facilitated by the SMPE.33 Founded in 1916 to support Hollywood’s intense research and development needs, the SMPE sustained and innovated the technologies and processes that fueled the

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rapidly consolidating American film industry. These entailed—among many others—chemical emulsions, light capture and refraction, illumination, and eventually electroacoustic amplification. Under the sponsorship of the SMPE, engineers working for industries as diverse as Eastman Kodak, General Electric, Bausch and Lomb, and DuPont oversaw technical matters. As SMPE members were not exclusively bound by the specific technical demands of the studios, they also enthusiastically debated broader systemic, industrial, aesthetic, and cultural concerns pertaining to cinema. Simultaneously, they also pursued their own broader business interests. Spanning these activities, portability and projection occupied a clear and coherent place, telling us what these concepts meant in relation to the evolving commercial film apparatus and industry. In short, looking at the history of film technology through the lens of the SMPE introduces a marked degree of horizontality into how we often conceptualize Hollywood at this time; it also reveals a rather fulsome and engaged discussion not just about the applied science of film projection, but about the very basic idea of what cinema was for, where it should appear, and what it could and should do as a cultural form.34 How would the apparatus move? What would that look like? What would it do? Who would it serve? Members of the SMPE were also well aware of the movie theater’s grand aspirational elements and directly addressed the technical ramifications of its outsized growth. The palace’s cavernous spaces demanded increased illumination, better screen reflectivity, expanded viewing angles, and eventually adequate sound amplification. All of these constituted technical challenges that fell within the SMPE’s remit. Nonetheless, not everyone shared Rothafel’s vision, and many rejected the assertion that the picture palace was the inevitable or ideal endpoint of moving picture projection. A chorus of other showmen, engineers, and technology manufacturers scrambled to complement and sometimes counter such visions, advocating instead for the importance of a simple-to-operate, highly adaptable projector notably different from the increasingly expensive, professionalized, and complicated theater. Many felt that the high-tech, permanent theater was a hindrance to cinema, as it restricted the further development of its forms and functions, preventing it from competing with more nimble media such as newspapers, books, and phonographs. With the picture palace as backdrop, the portable projector embodied a form of cinema that was do-it-yourself and bare bones by comparison. Crucially, throughout this phase (the 1920s to 1930s, in particular) this smaller kind of cinema entailed new applications for film. These discussions are readily evident across the growing and multidisciplinary membership of the SMPE.

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Freeing the tools of cinema from its already bulky architectural iterations would give it the ability to diversify and specialize, to become more responsive to wide-ranging needs, and to become as integral as the printed word to human expression and activity.35 The SMPE was an organization for engineers by name and purpose, but it also included a considerable sweep of working professionals: technology designers, manufacturers, and retailers. Members were also theater owners, managers, and projectionists who by necessity were dedicated to the art and science of film presentation. Collectively, members labored toward technical standards that could be identified and shared, and thus serve the entire industry. The rising importance of standardization in American industry and commerce in the broadest sense is nicely marked by the nearly concurrent formation of the American Engineering Standards Committee in 1918 (renamed the American Standards Association [ASA] and again the American National Standards Institute [ANSI]), which organized as an impartial body, largely comprised of engineers, to establish national standards in technical matters. The SMPE was thus not unique but reflective of broader shifts in American business, industry, and military practice. The imperative toward shared industry standards entailed a degree of collaboration between public and private organizations, across a range of disciplines, and within competitive industries. For its part, the SMPE shared knowledge and discussed the direction of technological change, responding to all facets of film, and later television, and eventually elements of the digital media industries.36 Cameras and their many elements, film stock and its emulsions, lighting and its tonal qualities, and projectors and the other technical elements of film presentation were all among the topics addressed during the association’s first ten years.37 Organizations like the SMPE “systemized and guided technological research and development,” which heretofore had been more haphazard and idiosyncratic, helping the American studio system to build an effective infrastructure for its consolidation, and advancing production and presentation procedures.38 One of the important effects of the SMPE is that it brought studio and non-studio personnel together into discussions about technology. Thus it enabled collaboration within but also beyond the studio system to include electrical and chemical engineers and equipment manufacturers, introducing what Luci Marzola has called a kind of horizontality to the increasingly vertically integrated studio system. In concrete terms, the SMPE called together a range of industries and expertise not singularly devoted to making movies. Yet developments across these industries were utterly essential to the material and technological base upon which the

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film industry relied. The SMPE did not just advocate for innovation, it also regularized, standardized, and stabilized studio operations.39 Like other major American trade groups, the SMPE incorporated research and development into the film industry’s activities, ensuring that discovery became instrumental to the managed processes that supported overall studio vitality.40 Many members of the SMPE belonged to very distinct disciplines and companies with business interests that fell well beyond the purview of the film industry proper. Kodak was a major supplier of film stock to the studios but had built its fortune in still photography.41 Bausch and Lomb made lenses for cameras and projectors but also manufactured optical equipment for eyeglasses, binoculars, telescopes, microscopes, periscopes, and searchlights. DuPont began as an explosives manufacturer and, by the 1920s, had morphed into a diversified chemical manufacturer with but one wing of company activity that extended to film. The formation of the SMPE signaled that technology made beyond studio walls would continue to be a “central catalyst” in industry expansion.42 Hollywood was a customer and client as well as a producer of films.43 To be clear, portable projectors were plainly no singular priority for the studios in the late teens or twenties. But the technological infrastructure stabilizing and ensuring the vitality of the studio system was intimately intertwined with developing portable projectors, as well as a fulsome array of other technical innovations. These innovations supported a vast range of American industries and furthered the application of scientific insight. Members of the SMPE, with their own dispersed interests, occasionally articulated interesting models for mapping the whole of industry operations. Through such documents one can observe a sprawling technological ecosystem but also a particular kind of technological imagination, one that thrived in parallel to our received histories of the studio system. Take for example a speech made in 1924 by Lloyd A. Jones, then president of the still-young SMPE. Jones delivered a forward-looking address calling for continual growth and ambitious innovation, while celebrating the many accomplishments of the eight-year-old organization. He reminded the gathered group that the very word engineer had an increasingly capacious and relevant definition: no longer just about operating a machine but about “the practical application of science” to machines as well as to human and industrial systems.44 In this way, members of the SMPE did far more than just discuss hardware; they also mapped, debated, and imagined whole systems constituting a motion picture ecology. Even its vision of the studios suggests a certain displacement of Hollywood proper, resituating the studios within a more complex series of interconnecting entities. For

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figure 8. Members of the SMPE had their own conceptualization of the film industry’s organizational structure, emphasizing here the importance of research and a dispersed social and cultural footprint for its products. Lloyd A. Jones, “Presidential Address,” Transactions of the SMPE 18 (May 1924): 17n.

instance, Jones offered a chart visualizing what he termed “the motion picture organism” (figure 8). According to Jones, this organism was comprised of three major areas: (1) component materials, (2) production and distribution, and (3) exhibition. Note on this diagram the ways in which the studios were but one partial element of a much broader system, which here includes technical innovation, ongoing research, specific applications, and eventually social and cultural interfaces, with vectors of influence mapped complexly across spheres and often in dialogical direction. Thinking about the American studio system as divided by the categories of production, distribution, and exhibition is foundational to our ways of understanding the film industry in general. Yet Jones proposed a significantly more complex and inclusive chart, one that situated categories like artistry (music, stage properties, costumes, literary and dramatic art materials) on an equal footing with chemistry (emulsions, celluloid, and processing chemicals) and physics (illumination, optical and electrical apparatus). The engineer’s

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“laboratory” is mapped alongside “the studio” and the “exchanges” (distribution entities), asserting clearly the creative role of research and development in Hollywood’s culture industry. It is perhaps not surprising that a group of engineers would amplify the importance of technical elements of the motion picture business in an industry organization chart. However, this sketch illuminates a multidisciplinary, cross-industries point of view. The business of film included its technical base and by association the myriad cognate industries that fed into and also benefitted from Hollywood’s voracious need for effective and efficient systems. Also rather telling is a more open approach to categories like film exhibition, which did not just entail technologies of theatrical presentation but also those that serviced school, church, social centers, and sales rooms—venues the studios themselves expressed little interest in but that held great promise for other members of the industry.45 The experts gathered under the canopy of the SMPE had a particular view of industry structure, one considerably less vertical than what we use to understand the American film industry. The organization easily saw beyond the productive forces, technologies, and systems associated primarily with Hollywood movies. Clearly implied here are new kinds of films, serving multiple functions, and feeding dispersed venues. For the SMPE, cinema was concretely and plainly an evolving, flexible, and iterative apparatus. Looking at what the engineers had to say about film technology provides a whole other view to not just technical innovation but innovation in several senses. First, it meant that new applications for scientific knowledge gleaned from one of the several areas subtending moving pictures— chemistry, optics, and electrical engineering—might easily evolve out of or feed into changes in a variety of other fields. For instance, innovations in camera lenses might result from or later influence changes in telescopy or microscopy. Thus, tracking technological change and moving pictures can easily lead one to a plethora of related developments far beyond the studios. Film emulsion innovations might easily bleed over into the lucrative retail, medical, or industrial photography industry, for example. Second, when the SMPE talked about technology they did so in a reasonably capacious way, engaged in broader discussions about precisely what cinema was and how it related to a complex social and cultural apparatus that included topics that sometimes had little to do with entertainment or movies. Portability and projection as dynamic elements of a seemingly settled apparatus become easily legible within this wider lens of technological development, evident in the organization’s earliest meetings and published documents. In fact, it was only a little more than a year after the fledgling society formed

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that its members began lobbying to standardize a definition of portability. Crucially, the purpose of a portable projection machine was presented as complementary to the increasingly sizable and complex professional theatre. As such, portability entailed a discussion about lightness of weight, reliability, and sufficient image quality and size, but these issues were ultimately subordinate to the challenge of flammability.

Capitalizing on Combustibility The idea of a portable projection booth, required for film shows in spaces not equipped for projection, neatly embodies the complexities of any simple definition of the term portability.46 Flammability raised questions about basic considerations. Is it safe to use? Easy to use? Under what conditions? Answers to these questions led to a myriad of solutions, among them portable projection booths (figure 9). These were either temporary or semi-permanent structures used to house projectors that ran flammable film. Such booths were often required in addition to but sometimes instead of projection licenses, and were compulsory in many municipalities and states to operate projectors. Nonflammable film gauges were exempt from such booths and often advertised with the feature “enclosing booth not required,” a certified indicator of safety offered by insurance underwriters.47 The ongoing calls from SMPE members to standardize definitions of portability as nonflammable further confirms that the use of flammable film was prevalent in portable machines. Alexander Victor, who owned Victor Animatograph, a manufacturer of projectors and related equipment, tethered portability to functions and venues beyond the movie theater. He proposed in 1918 that the SMPE adopt a definition for the term portable projector, adding it to the small but growing list of shared, industry-wide motion picture nomenclature. Nonflammability was the overriding quality of portability.48 In his address to the society, he joked: “No user could consistently arrive at the place of entertainment, carrying in one hand a truly portable projector, weighing about twenty-five pounds; but in the other hand, a fire-proof booth, weighing five hundred and fifty pounds.”49 It should also be pointed out that flammability here was not only about fire but also the resulting heft—physical and regulatory—designed to reduce its threat. In other words, Victor implored members of the SMPE to recognize that making film shows safe necessitated an impractical tradeoff on weight: in this instance fireproof booths required by law negated any commonsense idea about easy conveyance. Emphasizing the inevitable clandestine tendencies of would-be projectionists seeking to evade

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Figure 9. Fireproof portable booth. “Fireproof Booths,” Motion Picture News (May 17, 1919): 3253.

regulatory encumbrances, Victor mused that the rise of projectors disguised as sample cases, lunch boxes, and violin cases was emblematic. The intense demand for portable devices would persist through clever concealment and “stealth,” even at continued risk.50 Knowing his audience, Victor identified the clandestine projectionist as “a menace to public safety and the good repute of the industry.” He asserted a simple solution: nonflammable film.51 With fear of fire mitigated, projectionist and device would be free. Victor clearly understood the portable projector as a unique and relatively autonomous element of the apparatus crucial for opening up and expanding film viewing. According to him, portable projectors constituted a specific kind of viewing platform, one largely conceived of to show reduced 35 mm prints and to build on the relative success of the 28 mm Pathéscope as a distribution and exhibition format. Portable projectors were thus also partly conversion machines, transforming a professional gauge and predominantly theatrical experience into another kind of showing and watching. As a viewing apparatus, projectors were also strategically addressed to a persistent and also proliferating set of scenarios for film viewing beyond industry-controlled theaters.52 In the eyes of equipment manufacturers, it was a potentially limitless market-in-waiting. The flammability of celluloid had long been a factor shaping the ways in which cinema became regulated as a public phenomenon. Professionalization and licensing requirements for projectionists and regulation of theatrical spaces (projection booths in particular) had worked to contain the dangers posed to film audiences. Studios also took elaborate precautions to guard against production fires.53 Distribution regulations governing film required lead-lined shipping containers. Before that, the regular US mail was for decades deemed unsafe and illegal for film circulation.54 Likewise, film exchanges underwent regular inspections for safety violations and to ensure precautions such as sprinkler systems, sand buckets, and metal furniture.55 Theatrical projection booths themselves were the site of constant

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inspection and debate as to how they should be built, what materials they should use, and what degree of air ventilation was required.56 These very same conditions that made the commercial theatrical film show so entangled with established regulatory bodies posed acute challenges to other kinds of film presentations, which by their irregular, itinerant, or simply unadvertised nature were significantly harder to control. Largely because of the flammability of the standard professional 35 mm nitrate stock, and the temptation to simply use flammable film in unlicensed scenarios, powerful entities such as the Underwriters Laboratories (insurance industry) and the National Association of Fire Prevention adopted specific guidelines. Among them was this: “Approved miniature projectors must be so constructed that they cannot be used with films employed on the full sized commercial moving picture machine.”57 Such edicts made projecting 35 mm films on portable devices into a violation of public safety codes, an inherently dangerous activity. Thus, such regulations also served to secure the controlled ecosystem of commercial film and the place of theaters as their primary, safe, and sanctioned site for showing and watching movies. Professional films were crafted as dangerous encounters when unsupervised by a complex array of regulations. This made commercial films more difficult to bootleg, steal, and otherwise show in unauthorized scenarios, as one risked not only violating copyright but also public safety regulations. Flammability proved a convenient and powerful barrier to easy film use. This barrier was ultimately good for the commercial film business, since it thwarted gray- and black-market economies made possible by film’s reproducibility and the portable capacities of projectors using 35 mm. It is noteworthy that preceding and concurrent with discussions about safety, a wide contingent of moral reformers also weighed in on the matter of cinema’s safety, expressing concerns about the effects that images had on impressionable minds, leading, they feared, to vice and sexual corruption.58 The concept of safety itself bore a weight constituted by modern chemistry and modern moralizing alike. Throughout the development of regulations governing public film performance during the teens and 1920s, professional or standard film meant 35 mm nitrate-based film, which was regularly simply called “flammable” film. It is hard to imagine the equivalent today. A combustible television? Or, perhaps a desktop extinguisher for that fiery computer? Yet these were the basic conditions in which film technology operated. The subsequent regulations strained the apparatus in significant ways. Combined with the prospect of unlicensed film shows, wherein profit did not accrue to officially recognized elements of the film economy, there was a clear business

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imperative for manufacturers to develop an entirely new film gauge that would sidestep fire threat and mitigate against the easy interchangeability of professional film prints showing in unapproved performance scenarios. These two qualities—a specific, smaller format with a different film base—rendered portability less threatening to the growing film industry. It is also worth noting that the issue of what amounts to institutionalized and sanctioned flammability was reasonably unique to film technology. While some media certainly have the capacity to combust or cause fire, few can claim to have been so shaped by its threat. This demonstrates the prominent and enduring importance of chemistry, light, and heat in cultural as well as technical histories of film. In 1918, when Alexander Victor (owner of Victor Animatograph) implored the SMPE to formalize the conditions in which portability would thrive, that is, to standardize a definition of it, he asked that the SMPE adopt what was effectively Pathé’s 28 mm nonflammable stock as the portable standard. This was convenient for him, especially as he had licensed the gauge and had been actively promoting it for several years.59 Months after Victor’s request, speaking after the successful vote to approve this standard, W. B. Cook (Pathé’s American representative at the time) elaborated on the crucial role of nonflammable, or what he termed “slow-burning” film. Cook concurred that safety was a precondition for a viable portable market. Similar to Victor, he also extolled the virtues of reducing overall film stock use, which lowered costs. Unsurprisingly, he offered Pathé’s total cooperation with all other manufacturers in sharing technical standards. It looked to be a French triumph, partly because of the company’s clear head start in establishing market share.60

The Business of Film Gauges Progress through SMPE committees was slow. By 1921, the SMPE’s Nomenclature Committee, which was charged with establishing industrywide names and definitions for key terms, was still sorting out the precise wording for the different film gauges. It recommended that 35  mm film should be called “standard film” and that 28  mm should be known as “safety standard film.”61 At the same time, the Committee on Standards rejected a proposal to attach the words “professional” to the “standard film” (35 mm), deeming it too limiting, likely out of regard for the extant use of 35 mm beyond theaters.62 Such discussions continued and in 1922 Pathé introduced the smaller, nonflammable 9.5 mm gauge. Shortly after, Victor abandoned his loyalties to Pathé and joined Eastman Kodak

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and Bell and Howell to introduce 16 mm as an American nonflammable alternative to the French 28 mm and 9.5 mm gauges. Announced in 1923, 16 mm was also officially recognized by the SMPE’s Standards Committee in 1924, soon overtaking 28 mm as the dominant portable or “safety standard” gauge.63 The success of long-standing efforts to standardize a portable, nonflammable system (comprised of compatible film stock, cameras, and projectors) served to focus the technological innovation of portable projectors and to speed development of a more rationalized and expansive market. Established histories have documented the industry agreements among Eastman Kodak, Bell and Howell, and Victor Animatograph to forge ahead with 16 mm equipment, using nonflammable film stock as a new standard format. They have also emphasized the importance of 16 mm for amateur and home filmmaking, which Kodak actively targeted through its public relations and marketing campaigns.64 Such campaigns built on the company’s highly developed photography empire. The bias of 16 mm toward creating an amateur filmmaking market was initially deeply inscribed in the new format itself. Kodak distinguished its products from previous smallgauge systems partly by the camera’s use of reversal film stock, which allowed a positive print to be made directly from the same footage that had been exposed when running through the camera. This reduced the overall costs of film stock. Yet it mitigated against making multiple film copies.65 Scholars of amateur film identify reversal stock and its reduced costs as a key innovation and catalyst enabling small-gauge filmmaking and securing the success of the gauge.66 Although this factor clearly played a role in the growth of amateur filmmaking, it is worth pointing out that Kodak had no devout loyalty to amateur or hobbyist filmmaking per se. It was also the single largest supplier of film stock to the commercial film industry at the time, providing the basic materials for Hollywood filmmaking as well as the tens of thousands of exhibition prints it required to disperse those movies.67 While the scope of Kodak’s business eventually encompassed amateur, hobbyist, and many other small-scale modes of filmmaking, it also entailed untold millions of feet of film stock for striking small-gauge film prints. Content spanned all genres and served manifold purposes. In short, the more widespread the infrastructure for small projectors, the more film stock would be needed for film prints.68 Kodak was content agnostic. It was also equally as interested in film viewing as filmmaking. Evidence of this plainly resides in the company’s plans to build an international system of film rental libraries comprised of 16  mm reduction prints of professionally made (35 mm) movies. No afterthought, this rental system, dubbed

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Kodascope Libraries, was announced simultaneously with the unveiling of the new 16 mm system in 1923.69 This makes 16 mm not only a rebuke to Pathé’s 28 mm and 9.5 mm filmmaking systems, but also to Pathé’s library system established years earlier. Sixteen millimeter was a whole moving image system that grew to support a broad span of film applications.70 Together with the 8 mm standard established in 1932, these two formats spread nationally and internationally, holding significant market share for more than fifty years. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that portability as an idea and as a field of technological development can be reduced to the introduction of 16 mm film. Indeed, 1923—the year Kodak announced 16 mm—was an especially fertile one for portable presentation devices more generally, with the SMPE devoting sustained attention to new display mechanisms at its meetings. For instance, concurrent with the 16  mm standard’s announcement, the Transactions of the SMPE featured a special “Symposium on Portable Projectors” outlining six devices that embodied the principles of portability. Two longer essays devoted to the topic also appeared.71 Importantly, the discussion about portability in this symposium was largely reserved for projectors or devices that displayed films—rather than made films—testifying to the ways in which cameras and projectors early on were shaped by differentiated logics and imperatives. It was in this dossier that officials from Eastman Kodak laid out their specifications for the new 16 mm or “substandard,” “slow-burning” film stock.72 In a separate announcement published in the same issue of the SMPE’s transactions, the company presented its new camera and projector that worked with the new stock.73 Bell and Howell and Victor Animatograph also introduced compatible new equipment, issuing notices in 1923 and presenting their new products to the SMPE in 1924.74 Kodak’s projector, the Kodascope, was designed initially to throw an image that was anywhere between 30” × 40” and 40” × 54”, depending on the distance between the projector and screen. The base model was intended to “work in the home,” but Kodak also created an extra lamp-house in order to allow for adequate projection onto a seven-foot screen, which was deemed adequate for audiences of up to one hundred.75 The projector weighed twenty pounds. Far beyond the domestic, Kodak envisioned a diversification and proliferation of motion picture viewing into “every field of human activity”: “schools, institutions, and homes” and even those “that are at present undreamt of.”76 The projector could play films recorded in 16 mm; more importantly, it could also play films originally recorded in 35 mm but then reduced to 16 mm.

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Furthering the richness and significance of an industry-based discussion of portability were other devices announced in tandem with the introduction of the 16  mm format. C. Francis Jenkins, an early inventor of film projectors and eventually “wireless cinema” (television), espoused the virtues of a device dubbed the Discrola, which he presented to the association as a home projector. The Discrola used light and mirrors to transform rotating paper discs (struck from motion picture film) into moving pictures housed in a console resembling fine furniture. Jenkins likened the machine to the Victrola (a record player): simple to use with no threading, or other “technicalities.” The “record” is dropped on the rotating table; a button is pushed: “Instead of music we have a picture.”77 Jenkins stressed the absence of “fire risk” and the feasibility of national library networks for borrowing image-disks.78 Similar to Jenkins, Charles Urban, a pioneer of early cinema—particularly as a producer of travelogues, actuality (i.e., brief nonfiction), and educational films—presented the Spirograph to the SMPE: a viewing device based on a patent he had acquired in 1907.79 It used a spinning disc that turned past a light source and allowed mounted, celluloid images to appear on a small screen. The device afforded “the inexpensive production of moving pictures in miniature, in the home, school, office or elsewhere,” and played a series of images equivalent in duration to a seventy-five-foot 35 mm reel of film, likely well under two minutes.80 It reportedly weighed three and a half pounds.81 The operation of the device included the ability to fully stop on single images. It was also convertible for use in scenarios of full light or daylight, with an invertible mechanism that enabled the normal projection function to be transformed into a singleviewer “animated microscope.”82 The device was thus adaptable; it functioned as a regular or as a self-contained tabletop projector that operated from close-range behind the screen, rather than in front. Such devices were fairly common, reorienting projection away from its spatial implications and interdependencies with ambient light and toward a more controlled and contained box, eliminating variabilities of environmental light, natural or artificial. Evolved from their peepshow origins and Edison’s early Kinetoscope, these devices took on different names: daylight cinema, projection boxes, or rear-projection machines. They worked to reduce some of the most basic challenges of portable and adaptable projection devices whose operation was frequently challenged by inconsistent environmental light. Other features of portability cohered across the devices discussed, including the persistent impulse to imbue projectors with more control over the speed and size of the projected form. For instance, in 1923, Pathé announced improvements to its Pathéscope 28  mm portable projector.

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These ameliorations mostly addressed the machine’s ability to supply smooth and steady images at speeds slower than normal in order to aid use in educational and “other fields where analysis of the movement illustrated” is frequently desirable.83 Other articles from the same year held forth on the general principles shaping both the technical properties of portable projection as well as its social function. SMPE member J. R. Mitchell averred that portable projectors should largely be articulated to the “practical” sphere, distinct from the professional theatrical one. He asserted that portability was an “essential element in the great expansion of the motion picture industry.” Key properties included: simplicity of operation, safety, ease of care and operation, ability to stop and show a still, and a degree of reliability.84 Others agreed, identifying devices of varying weight, size, and function, yet espousing shared properties of “compactness, simplicity, lightness, practicability and economy.”85 These technical qualities were deemed essential not only to the relevance of motion pictures in the home but also to their “greater general use in industry, science and education.”86 Advocates declared the portable projector was no longer a “supertoy” and that the format had irrefutably turned serious. The ideals of adaptability and utility persisted.87 The rise of projection across venues, implicitly indexing the quality of adaptability is evident in the growing number of formal “how-to” manuals that became available to assist working and fledgling projectionists in their chosen craft. Starting in 1918 and continuing for decades, SMPE-member James R. Cameron began publishing Motion Picture Projection and Sound Pictures, a guidebook and technical manual for working projectionists.88 In print for decades, Cameron’s manual began as assistance for projectionists servicing film activities carried on by the American Red Cross, Knights of Columbus, the Jewish Welfare League, and the YMCA. The manual expanded in scope to primarily support conventional theatrical projection needs. Yet throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the manual also stands as a sign of the interrelated elements of projection bridging formal and informal fields: commercial and noncommercial, standard and small gauges, theater and beyond. By 1928, the manual housed a sizable chapter on 16 mm as well as slide projectors, slide film projectors, and automatic and continuous rearprojection boxes used for business and advertising, show window displays, and units “sometimes placed on the top of a building located at a point in high traffic circulation.”89 Safety was a primary feature of such manuals, with protocols governing permanent and portable projection booths also making sustained appearances in its pages. Projection in such manuals, not defined exclusively as theatrical, had a much more ecumenical flair. Similar

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to the discussions underway at the SMPE, these manuals addressed a broad scope of devices, procedures, and venues that did not simply reify or reflect an absolute dichotomy between “theaters” and “everywhere else,” but rather mapped a whole field of complementary practices. By examining industry discourses and trajectories we can see a fuller portrait of portable film presentation emerging. Some elements of this picture indicate technical limitations and others invoke imaginative future-oriented ideals of projected images everywhere. In technical terms, nonflammability was a primary quality. Also crucial were factors such as ease of use, reliability, low cost, lightness of weight, control over the appearance of the projected image, and adaptability both in size as well as speed of image. Location of performance was also regularly considered. The home, school, industry, lab, and church arose as coequal venues for projection and film performance, an unlikely agglomeration of venues in which film shows might grow roots and serve existing and new functions. This linking of cinema to portability also included discs, mirrors, rear projection devices, consoles, and stand-alone projectors. These devices were small and big, and they ran films at varied speeds. Most proclaimed control over the speed as well as the direction of film movement. In other words, they introduced performance variability and user control into the motion of motion pictures. This includes outright stopping a film, holding a single frame in illuminated stasis on the screen. Different institutions asserted very different needs. The military wanted projectors that would work on ship decks to resist the deterioration caused by salty sea air. They expected the devices to remain small enough to pass through a ship’s hatch for use above and below deck. The navy developed screens that were translucent so that sailors could see the film from both sides, maximizing lines of sight while watching from limited deck space.90 Specific needs were also voiced by experts in physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, architecture, business, government, and industry; members from each of these constituencies presented to the SMPE. Regular speeches at society meetings made specialized needs known while also announcing varied and ongoing uses.91 Histories of 16 mm and 8 mm are frequently found attached to the growing literature devoted to amateur and home filmmaking, which has made significant contributions to expanding our understanding of film practice and representation.92 Yet the emphasis on the categories of amateur and home filmmaking have somewhat obscured the other salient features of these formats both in terms of the context in which these technologies emerged and also with regard to their longer-term impact. In the same

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1923 issue of the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers that features a wave of attention directed at portable devices, articles appeared promulgating the use of motion pictures in education and the plain request for a safe “simple, portable” device for showing in partially lit classrooms.93 The need for such devices in the military also recurred throughout these years. Members of the visual education community and representatives of museums, government, community groups, and amateur associations presented position papers to the society about the place of portable projection and motion pictures within their organizations.94 Oddities abound and the precise qualities that comprised portability differed from device to device. Some were articulated to a portability that was simple in function, playing two-minute films on a gadget that could be carried in a shirt pocket—a device “no bigger than a cigarette case.” There were also projectors designed into trucks, promoted as “theaters on wheels.” Some were used for political, publicity, and advertising campaigns, still others for mobile news outlets and showing educational and entertainment films where theaters were not practical.95 One such unit allowed a 6’ × 7’ image, with a speaker raised up through the roof.96 Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, the discussion of portable projectors appeared across the emerging committees that reflected the diverse activities of the SMPE. During the 1920s, specifically, this included the Progress Committee and the Standards and Nomenclature Committee. Additional committees emerged as the organization grew. In 1931, the Projection Screens Committee formed and was dedicated to all kinds of screens, permanent and collapsible. In 1932, the Non-Theatrical Equipment Committee was established, charged with “matters relating to 16 millimeter film cameras and projectors, accessories such as screens, film splicers, etc. film slide projectors, glass slide projectors, and 35 millimeter portable and semi-portable projectors.”97 This committee welcomed members representing companies with clear interests in equipment manufacturing and sat alongside the Standards Committee, the Projection Practice Committee, and the Historical and Museum Committee, among others. Collectively, such committees fully and formally institutionalized portability as a normalized element of the industry’s technological apparatus. By 1932, not only had 16 mm become coterminous with portability, so too had portability acquired an enduring industry association with the term nontheatrical, rhetorically shifting away from an open-ended concept to one that was often cast as the theater’s other. With no observable constraints placed on committee activities and discussion, the term nontheatrical was likely used as a kind of tactic to make portability seem less threatening to the

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studios and to theater owners, still mighty lynch pins in the film ecology. Crucially, this term did not mute portability’s growth, its diversity, or the power of its immanent capacities. It is worth revisiting one of the basic goals of the SMPE: technological innovation and its management. Portability occupied but one place among an ever-expanding discussion and spiraling imperatives. The “Progress Committee” regularly reported on new developments in film use. During the late 1920s, this included film applications in universities, hospitals, sports, and business. The society also consistently announced developments in specialized equipment, including micro-photography, high-speed photography and cinematography, X-rays, irregular picture ratios, and telephoto lenses.98 By the end of the decade, unfolding discussions about screen technology, television, stereoscopy, color, and, of course, sound had all transpired at association meetings. Looking at the pages of the SMPE journal throughout the 1920s, portability provides a window into an entirely different apparatus, one that was highly specialized, conscripted by a group of disciplines, and adapted to paradigmatically unique functions compared to those of Hollywood. Film projection was a modern, multipurpose family of operations. Throughout the 1920s, portable moving-image projection devices worked primarily with film stock, although occasionally with glass slides and paper. The discussions on portability littering the journal’s pages included calls for machines that could run without special training and in a slew of spaces with varying conditions. Projected images appeared in sizes from five inches to eight feet across. New or residual, institutional or individual, portability manifested in many machines and espoused multiple properties and uses. This expanded horizon for cinema was quite at home within and also beyond the industry’s core technical organization.99

Cultures of Technology and Technologists Moving beyond the activities of the SMPE, many other shifts were underway that shored up and secured the longevity of portable cinema. Shortly after establishing the 16 mm standard, Kodak publicly launched the Kodascope Libraries in 1925, to distribute 16 mm film prints internationally to the general public. This initiative relied on Kodak’s preexisting and international retail network of camera shops, as well as drug stores and department stores, all serving as distribution and rental outlets.100 In addition to Kodascope Libraries, by 1928 rental library services in the United States numbered twenty-two and included Bell and Howell’s Filmo Library, Pathé’s

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Pathéscope Library, the Ganz Home Film Library, and the Film of the Month Club.101 Hollywood also entered into the reduction-print market with the opening of Universal Studios’ Show-at-Home Movie Library.102 In the often boosterish marketing literature for these endeavors, films were likened to books and promoted as standard holdings in any home library. Select film titles were released in a way similar to the promotion of middlebrow literature, wherein, like books, films would be issued in limited editions targeted to “particular tastes.” Available titles were numerous, including those from defunct production companies, as well as films grouped under such categories as family, sports, comedy, instructionals, history, and news.103 Some members of the industry objected to technologies that loosened the theater’s hold on film projection. Yet advocates of portable projectors persisted in maintaining that interest in movies at home or school would only buttress theatrical attendance, creating greater appreciation for the commercial show.104 Phonographs and radio were invoked as analogous technologies that benefitted the traditional modes they were feared to be replacing. These media forms, it was claimed, had not harmed opera halls or concert venues. Instead, the new had in fact revitalized the old.105 Within the history of film, Patricia Zimmerman has shown that the availability of new small-gauge film cameras catalyzed a similar discourse that worked to position affordable cameras less as an affront to extant film practice than as an inferior and perhaps playful aspiration to it.106 Companies like Kodak adopted what we might consider a system of accommodation wherein new film technologies were tethered to home filmmaking and film showing, and were consistently framed as hobbyist approximations of Hollywood style and skill. Advice columns, articles, and advertising collaborated to contain the threat of new affordable consumer film technologies by circumscribing their potential. This fortified a seemingly vast and unbridgeable gap not just between amateur and professional craft but also between home and theatrical viewing spaces. Sometimes the theater loomed particularly large in the discourses of the amateur and home film show, appearing in the form of advice columns helping the budding home projectionist climb the impossible mountain toward professional polish, for instance. Yet this kind of discursive asymmetry was not uniformly the case for the vast majority of discussions about portable projectors. Amateurism and hobbyism represent a small subset of the ways in which the technology industry was shaping film’s expanding apparatus. This also means that the Main Street movie theater did not always loom as the workaday projectionist’s opposite. Across a wide discussion, the theater was just as often construed as incidental to cinema’s vast and unmined capacities.

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Cultures of Portability Beyond the realms of the home and the amateur, portable devices fed many other cultural activities. While those I will discuss in subsequent chapters were apposite to Hollywood, some were more radical, opposed to, or expressly seeking to shape the film industry. These developments were also regularly deliberated by the SMPE. Articles on film appreciation, film education, little theaters, art film, and the rise of film as an instrument of state appeared in its journal throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. Representatives of the amateur film movement also had a voice with the organization.107 Of note was the SMPE’s full view to developments in the Soviet Union. Sergei Eisenstein attended a society meeting, and L. I. Monosson of Amkino, a company that primarily distributed Soviet films in the United States, provided the society with a lengthy overview of the nationalized plan for “cinemafication” of the country. This presentation included a glimpse of film training and education, production infrastructure, and the extensive efforts to expand film viewing, almost half of which, Monosson claimed, was constituted by traveling cinema outfits.108 Eisenstein also presented to the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) during the same California visit, addressing film technology directly. Eisenstein explored the virtues of what he called “the dynamic square,” a new screen shape that he deemed more dynamic and conducive to proper machine aesthetics.109 He rejected the old horizontal screen as being nostalgic, likening it to the dated myths of the frontier and fantasies of bucolic landscapes. Favoring instead verticality, Eisenstein celebrated its capacity to encompass the power of technology, engineering, and industry. He ultimately settled on the square as the shape that best showcased dynamic and dialectical clashes of all manner: optical, spatial, emotional, psychological. Playfully chiding industry members, he teased that point-and-shoot photographs and even postcards were more dynamic than motion pictures. What is interesting about this for our purposes is that these encounters occurred during an intense period of technological change, first and foremost the transition to synchronized sound. Eisenstein provoked the industry to think broadly about its apparatus, defamiliarizing things like screen ratio and theater dimensions to industry members. He did so by inserting a healthy dose of dialectical thinking into his presentations, encouraging disruption. His reception at the MPPDA is unknown. Nevertheless, Eisenstein’s playful needling would have been perfectly at home at the SMPE, where both the science and the exploratory fictions of film and technology found fertile ground.

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The technological imagination supporting an expanded presentational apparatus appeared in other instances as well. Just before moving back to England to help build what would become a highly influential documentary film movement, John Grierson addressed the SMPE. In 1927, he implored members to consider the film industry’s responsibilities to popular, democratic principles and to recognize the audience as a thinking and engaged one. His speech included favorable discussions of documentary films, as well as British, German, and Soviet films.110 Grierson is well known to have spent a lifetime building film networks beyond the commercial theater, which was where he felt cinema’s most important contribution would ultimately manifest.111 Striking a different chord, Symon Gould spoke to the organization about the importance of Little Theaters, a contemporaneous if fledgling movement of independent theaters that showed foreign, repertory, and art cinema.112 Roy Winton also attended an SMPE meeting, outlining the workings of the Amateur Cinema League— an international association committed to amateur filmmaking and showing, broadly defined.113 The logics motivating each of these presentations tacitly or explicitly entailed a loosening of the American studio’s hold on filmmaking, but more so on film exhibition. Each plainly invoked the desirability of expanding the cultural functions of film performance, requiring venues and technologies to ease themselves from Hollywood’s grip. Indeed, throughout the United States and internationally, a diverse cultural movement grew in tandem with these industry discussions. Well-known activists and artists identified the “self-operated projector” as crucial to early film theory and criticism as well as the movement to diversify film as an intellectual, political, and aesthetic pursuit. Members of the avant-garde, theorists, writers, and critics extending from communist to fascist had started to integrate thinking about, making, watching, and, importantly, writing about cinema into their activities. This included the development of film societies—groups of people usually in major cities that sought to watch films selected for their artistic, historical, aesthetic, political, or educational potential, and other films not available on commercial film screens. Growing the means by which films could be seen outside of the logics dictated by the commercial industry was increasingly considered essential to a significant engagement with this new, vital cultural form. In other words, the means by which films could be seen had to be separated from the dominant institutions of film and their methods that constrained the form and prevented it from evolving.114 Many of these groups called for increased access to films and the means by which to project them. Portable projectors throughout the 1920s are

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plainly and clearly linked to the growth of film theory, evident in the pages of journals such as Close Up, wherein its contributors advocated for forming film societies and called for “little projectors” and a way to liberate film exhibition from extant constraints (commercial and regulatory), many of which were focused on movie theaters.115 Parallel to this, key modernist figures like Lazlo Moholy-Nagy integrated projection into an avant-garde, multimedia art practice, freeing projection from its role in commercial cinema and using it to refashion light as kinetic sculptures.116 In the United States, the emergence of a sustainable portable projector or “small screen” movement, based on simple operation, takes on its fullest meaning with the magisterial palace as backdrop. “Small Theater,” “Midget Cinema,” “Portable Film Show”: each of these terms can be seen throughout industry literature of the period to describe various kinds of film projection. Some, such as Little Theaters, had limited seating capacity and offered specialized programming. Many others operated beyond the theater proper. The ferment of the Soviet project fed the uptake of film and photography by the Worker’s Film and Photo League in the United States, which relied on portable, adaptable film presentations in unions halls, barns, and other locations. A film society movement grew, mostly in major cities. Including engaged modernists and worker-activists alike, this movement called for the diversification of film form and function away from Hollywood’s conventions. This entailed efforts to overtly politicize, aesthetically innovate, and also serve the broad family of needs grouped under the term civil society.117 Such shifts were not only about adapting film technologies but also placing them in dialogue with other media, sometimes emulating their functions or even replacing them: newspapers, magazines, books, photographs, canvas. A related, and in a sense more fundamental, call for a suitable apparatus to function in ways that these other media could was inseparable from calls for film’s specific technological and political diversification. Film historians have recognized that particularly in film’s earliest years the direction the technology and its institutionalization would take remained unclear. These discussions have been framed frequently around the struggle to establish legitimacy as a middle-class, respectable cultural form. Many other questions remained to be determined, including those pertaining to film form. Would film become a storytelling medium? Or might it remain a more sensationalist, attractions-based phenomenon? Yet another enduring set of questions pertained to where cinema would happen. While the rise of Hollywood’s institutions clearly amount to a certain kind of settling of such matters, the discussion about homes, schools, store windows, business and industrial uses, civic and social clubs, unions,

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museums, and transportations hubs continued. It is essential to differentiate specific sites from the institutions that undergirded them, the technologies and functions they served, and their evolving forms and meanings. The portability of projection was fundamental to a diversification of film form and function, an expanding number of institutions, and a proliferation of the sites of film performance. Persistent discussions recorded on the pages of the SMPE transactions and journals demonstrate that technical deliberations were foundational for these wider and widely evident considerations. Moreover, through examining these discussions, we can also trace negotiations and settlements, observing a coherent cluster of qualities that came to shape the meaning of portability as it pertained to film presentation. Over and over again, portable film projectors responded to appeals for a device that was easy to use, adaptable, programmable, and able to maximize image control. Most important of all, portable projectors came to be safe—that is, not flammable. It was this collective understanding that would catalyze subsequent developments. Portable projection requires thinking about film performance as an assemblage of devices, institutions, events, and purposes. Most importantly, these discussions and performance parameters grew in close proximity to the evolving film industry and thrived within the emerging and increasingly organized technical base that supported it. Portability as a technical capacity arose in response to the evermore high-tech and architecturally grand theater, espousing advanced technical principles while also plainly embodying Hollywood’s ambition and its corporate ideals. The imperative to expand the apparatus was not a simple story of ceaseless emergence or avant-gardism. It is also one demonstrating that members of the film industry (SMPE) were striving toward an ideal of portability underpinned by shared standards and the capital investments supplied by powerful industries. New markets were paramount. While amateurs, artists, and activists gained access to the technologies that were responding to demands for a self-operated and flexible machine, portable projectors were also serving governmental and industrial authorities in need of efficient and effective persuasion techniques. Thus, while portability addressed demands to diversify the cultural functions of film, it did not function in ways that only celebrated new modes of experimentation or marginalized, authentic expression. Portable projectors also decidedly fueled the very same asymmetries that artist, amateur, and activist projects sought to upend.

2. Spectacular Portability Cinema’s Exhibitory Complex, American Industry, and the 1939 World’s Fair

The 1939 New York World’s Fair is often recalled as the setting for television’s debut. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) inaugurated the country’s first regular television service with live coverage of the fair’s opening ceremonies, broadcast throughout the New York area on an estimated two hundred television screens.1 Building on his legacy as the “radio president” with his now famous Fireside Chats, President Roosevelt also played a key role in television’s history, delivering the first televised presidential address while speaking at the fair’s opening-day celebration. This seemingly small speech efficiently combined a new technology with the symbolic power of a presidential address, supported by a grand exposition, funded by America’s largest and most powerful industries and corporations. Roosevelt’s words were an auspicious victory for the fair’s public relations team, which aggressively promoted the event across media and with all manner of triumphalism. This anecdote also reminds us of the place that public relations experts and strategies have long played in our media histories, selling us on dreams of connectivity, abundance, power, and convenience. All of this was gathered under the fair’s theme, “The World of Tomorrow,” declaring an immanent utopia fueled by technology, voracious consumerism, and benevolent corporations intent only on American well-being and prosperity. Despite its distortions and outright absurdities, any reasonable observer would have to agree that it was a pretty good day for television. At the fair, RCA, General Electric (GE), and Westinghouse each demonstrated television technology, less as a domestic broadcast technology than a series of interactive exhibits. Intrepid fairgoers could stand and speak in front of a camera, a performance that simultaneously appeared elsewhere on the fairgrounds displayed on television screens that measured nine by 71

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eleven inches. Images instantaneously traveled by air.2 The technological transformation and transmission of the human body fit well within the fair’s broader commitment not just to heralding the newest industrial and technological advances, but also to exhibiting them in the newest and most engaging ways. These mediated and participant-based forms of exhibition echoed other exhibits nearby. AT&T invited visitors to make free longdistance calls, allowing them to instantly connect by voice to loved ones or strangers across the country. The communications behemoth also offered visitors the chance to make audio recordings of their own voices on discs, which they could then take home.3 Westinghouse urged visitors to talk, sing, or whistle into a microphone, which then translated the sounds into electromagnetic waves appearing on a nearby screen as moving, wavy lines. Television was but one among many modern technologies reshaping how American media corporations were displaying and presenting the future in 1939. In retrospect, it is easy to see the prescience of, in particular, television’s integration into fair exhibits. The phantom tele-ceiver, as it was called, signaled the postwar ascendancy of the electronic frontier that was soon to follow. The fair’s theme, “The World of Tomorrow,” boldly declared as much; though, to be sure, television was still an unpredictable technology in 1939. Its business models, institutions, and programming formats were not firmly set, and there was limited, mostly live, content. Screens were small, and image quality was uneven and uniformly poor compared to the familiar film images of the time. Indeed, in a telling and prophetic technological sleight of hand, RCA set up a 16 mm film projector and a small local transmitter on the fair site that could feed television receivers throughout the grounds by cable with reliable, constant, prerecorded film content for fear that its transmitters based at Radio City Music Hall would fail to supply steady and clear signals.4 The ten-minute movie played on a loop and featured current events to increase the illusion of liveness; film supplied roughly one-third of the images that appeared on television screens at the RCA exhibit. While television can be seen as a wondrous indicator of the near future, evolving small technologies of cinema prove—upon more careful inspection—to have played a more prominent role in a whole range of fair exhibits, including those of television itself. Contrary to the common refrain that television was the demise of cinema, the fair tells a different story. Television was a popular but ultimately minor element of fair exhibits and exhibition techniques. Cinema on the other hand made a lasting and significant impact on exhibition techniques and visitor experience. The display and

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performance scenarios created by a notable assemblage of film screens and projectors varied. Some were small, others big. Some hosted seated spectators and others worked to catch the eye of fairgoers who were simply walking by. Some projectors showed feature-length films; many more played a mix of industrial, advertising, and business films. Still others provided information about and schedules of fair-wide events. Some showed loops and extracts. The World’s Fair of 1939 and 1940 in New York City was a historically rich event for its use of film and its technologies.5 The fair boasted over thirty-four purpose-built, dedicated movie theaters, amounting to an unusually dense clustering of films, technologies, and spaces. These theaters, widely varying in size and sophistication, showed hundreds of films, often continuously from morning until night. Yet what may seem at first to be an impressive if conventional iteration of cinema’s apparatus—film, projection, dark room, seated audience—was actually an opportunity to enrich our understanding of film exhibition beyond what we tend to think of as discrete theaters and toward lasting changes in film performance and projection scenarios. At the fair, many more moving images appeared in venues that could in no way be deemed theatrical. Instead, exhibitors made use of walls, floors, ceilings, small booths, and boxes.6 Such film display devices played in large halls, small galleries, and walkways designed expressly to facilitate steady human traffic. Moving images addressed a number of spectatorial dispositions—focused, bedazzled, delighted, distracted—with varied duration. Importantly, film performance unfolded within or nearby elaborate multimedia exhibits wherein a visitor’s eye ambled over texts, still-images, objects, maps, diagrams, working machines, and perhaps eventually a projected piece of film. Many fair exhibits embodied corporate image and aspiration, employed a range of expressive tools, and espoused the virtues of technological progress: streamlined architecture, moving sidewalks, rocket launches, frozen forests, talking cars, and wise-cracking robots! Portable film technologies were a regularized element of this vast and captivating event. Considering the whole of the fair’s expansive context for film performance, a dynamic tapestry was put forth of celluloid formats, techniques, and processes: silent, sound, Technicolor, Kodachrome, black and white, 3D, animation, live action, 35  mm, 16  mm, and 8  mm. Film projectors were concealed and some foregrounded; others worked by front or rear projection. Select films showed as automated loops; some ran by the push of a button or as parts of unique hybrid performances that combined live and prerecorded elements. Some were designed and featured as sizable,

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spectacular augmentations of a purpose-built environment, while others were more ambient, blending in with other whirling, winding, flashing, and buzzing attractions. Moving-image technologies at the fair should not be understood merely as a body of films but as elements within a particular and sometimes experimental alignment of words, images, and sounds enabled by projection machines situated within a whole display ecology. Critically, while the fair’s rhetoric emphasized the future, its exhibition practices and elaborate media strategies also served to punctuate a decade of developments in which portable film technologies had been gradually transforming into business machines. Film use at the fair indexes a paradigmatic expansion of film display, exhibition, and culture. This consumer-driven and wondrous “World of Tomorrow” was immense, with no shortage of creative applications for portable projection technologies, from bottles of antacid to panoramic colorscapes. They served multiple purposes, from directing the eye to directing pedestrian traffic: This way, please! Indeed, the fair provides a glimpse of a blossoming film economy and a view to a very different film culture from the one implied by Hollywood’s Main Street marquee. This other film culture was predicated on ease of use, automation, and adaptability, on electrical display and push-button playback systems. It was, in part, a culture of gadgetry and consumerism that fed a demand for small moving-image machines both on the part of those who made and sold things and those seeking to buy them. In other words, we can see at the fair symptomatic evidence that film technologies fully participated in an everyday consumer ecology, one that shows the easy merging of film projectors and films with a culture of buying and selling, individual ownership, self-operated display, and spectacular corporate entertainment. At the level of merchandising, retailing, and managing public relations, film became a standard tool of a business culture rooted in the need to master the new art of telling compelling stories—about itself and to itself—with moving images and sounds and to harness new methods of placing products in motion-bound, malleable dreamworlds of mechanically reproduced sound and light. With the rise of this adaptable film apparatus, children and adults alike were routinely invited into an ascendant form of audiovisual address. They were offered often magical, rhythmic, mediated consumer experiences that extended well beyond the temporary fair and became standard elements of American media culture in the broadest sense. Amusing animated films made factory work seem like fun. Self-assembling cars were made of parts that flew through the air as they performed gravity-defying acrobatics. Futurist tales about highways assured us that soon fast roads would free us

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from urban drudgery. Magical electrical appliances automated chores and liberated housewives. All of these promises and more were made on film screens big and small with the assistance of an unfolding family of portable technologies. All worked in concert to normalize the rise of corporateindustrial languages seeking to increase buying, decrease worker dissent, and normalize a foundational modern ideal: new technologies are good. Recent writing by film and media scholars multiplies the kinds of films we examine and the methods we use to consider their importance.7 It also presupposes that we must be equally adept at assessing the complex scenarios in which these films appeared and the devices that made them audible and visible.8 Here portable film technologies are presented as components of an exhibition event, one irretrievably linked to industrial and corporate practice. As such, what follows augments recent writing on expositions and exhibitions that tends to focus on art, interactivity, immersion, and the progressive humanist ideals of connection and citizenship.9 Instead, I use the fair as a case study for mapping the ways in which film technologies and techniques were appropriated by a new generation of advertising, public relations experts, and industrial designers interested in exploring what they deemed a productive interface between moving images and sounds, using the languages of entertainment, didacticism, and persuasion.10 Film technologies created a dreamworld that developed parallel to and in dialogue with Hollywood, one fully invested in practices of industrial showmanship and the unbridled consumerism its promulgators hoped would follow. During the late 1920s and 1930s, American cinema underwent significant changes, with technological transformation playing a prominent role. Key here is the shift to synchronized sound film, which affected how films were made, who made them, how they were presented, and what watching sounded like (or what listening looked like, depending on your frame of reference). The shift to synchronized sound was also undergirded by corporate realignment, fortifying links among the telephone, radio, recorded music, publishing, and film industries. As the primary innovators of synchronized sound technologies and the amplification systems required to make these sounds heard, the electrical utilities served as important players in the corporate reorganization underway, necessarily enlarging what we think of when we think of the film industry proper.11 East Coast banks also acquired a larger stake in the American entertainment industry as part of these shifts.12 During these realignments, movie theaters became more complex, incorporating new technologies that electronically reproduced and amplified sounds that filled cavernous palaces and modest halls alike.13 Live radio broadcasts from movie theaters during the 1930s promoted

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made-in-Hollywood wares, and further instituted select flagship theaters as epicenters for unique occasions that also operated as dispersed, broadcast events. This period plainly indicates dedicated investment in theaters, further consolidating a particular architectural model as constitutive of cinema’s apparatus and its industry. Yet these technological and industrial shifts also facilitated another concurrent technological and industrial transformation, one that is preeminent for understanding the march of portable film technologies. Determined efforts to promote film as an architectural spectacle and experience—which survived robustly through to the opening of Radio City Music Hall late in 1932, one of the last grand picture palaces—were somewhat muted by the effects of the Great Depression. Shrinking audiences gave way to lower ticket prices, double features, cheap snacks (popcorn), and also to new and less ornate and ostentatious theater designs.14 Throughout the teens and into the early 1930s, the ideals enshrined in the portable apparatus persisted. The same year that the six-thousand-seat Radio City theater opened, an even smaller portable film format emerged. Eight millimeter was a new American gauge, even smaller, lighter, and less expensive than its 16 mm predecessor established in 1923. Quietly and slowly, another kind of cinema continued to take root: lightweight, easy-to-use, affordable, and highly adaptable. Over the course of these decades, dozens of such projectors and screens were designed, sold, and used, fortifying this other kind of cinema. This portable apparatus continued to assert that moving images need not be confined to Hollywood, theaters, feature films, stars, or big budgets. Cinema could serve a longer slate of purposes, affording a shifting assemblage of production, distribution, display, and performance techniques that were highly adaptive to an evolving media ecology and the growing number of institutions that shaped them. This kind of cinema was poised directly against the institutional and structural monumentality of the Hollywoodsanctioned movie theater and the regulatory structures that controlled what could appear there. It also sparked a degree of rearrangement, experiment, provisionality, and hybridity, as well as a series of additional uses for celluloid and projector. Included among these were the ascendant communications and public relations needs of American industry. Cinema’s expanded apparatus facilitated and accelerated the use of moving images and sounds by American corporations (and foreign industries operating in the United States). By the late 1930s, such companies included Bell Telephone, John Deere, International Harvester, General Mills, Shell Oil, Renault, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Chrysler Motor Corporation, Consolidated Edison, Westinghouse, Radio Corporation of

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America, Coty Cosmetics, United States Steel, and Republic Steel.15 To be sure, some of the films made by these companies showed on conventional theatrical movie screens, but many more showed in multipurpose spaces and in provisional venues carved out on factory floors, lunchrooms and boardrooms, in retail outlets, social clubs, and at industrial fairs and exhibitions throughout the 1930s. People gathered in temporary and repurposed spaces to watch public relations, advertising, and training films, among others. The World’s Fair built on these practices; however, it also amplified them using an event-based logic that had long permeated large-scale industrial exhibitions and fairs, as well as other exhibition techniques that employed small-scale adaptable displays. The discussion that follows maps the differences between the exceptional monumentality of the fair and the more prosaic modes by which media and messages circulated. It also notes the ways in which film and other media fostered traffic across these categories. In other words, the use of film technologies at the fair is inextricably linked to quotidian manifestations of portable cinema as well those that are spectacular, immersive, and experimental.

Film and Its Dreamworlds The history of moving images has a long and deep relationship to cultures of exhibition, performance, and display that preexisted film per se and constituted the practices and traditions from which cinema grew: expositions and fairs, vaudeville and theater, magic shows, penny arcades, museums. That film and fair found early consort is not surprising. One of the key functions of fairs was to promote the wonders of the industrial age and celebrate its products. Some of the first films, wondrous in their own way, were those dedicated to advertising.16 Previous scholarship has documented the early uses of film technologies at turn-of-the-century World’s Fairs.17 Fairs and exhibitions sought to command attention, and the biggest of them invested significant resources to harness new and innovative display techniques to explain, normalize, and celebrate industry and its often global and colonial ambitions. As such, fairs are important venues for analyzing cinema’s place in geopolitical and economic injustice. Throughout the twentieth century—at international, national, and regional fairs—cameras, films, projectors, and screens coalesced as an exhibition form that became regular tools in social and economic life and all of its asymmetries.18 While only a few projections transpired at turn-of-the-century fairs, as many as three thousand films were shown by the time Montreal hosted the World Exposition of 1967, with its gigantic screens and advanced

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audiovisual installations.19 The history of fairs and cinema is a complicated one wherein new technologies of film, corporatism and industrialism, experimentation, art, and geopolitics converge upon all manner of exhibitory genres, from the highly didactic to the intensely abstract, from unidirectional address to multidirectional and immersive experience.20 Fairs are therefore important for thinking about film and film technology for a number of reasons. Clearly, fairs entail an inordinate amount of capital, alerting us to how those who possess and control that capital elect to perform its powers for those without. Fairs often came with the full endorsement of governments and were frequently dressed up in the newest practices of presentation and display, setting technological and performance standards that directed subsequent exhibitions for years to come. The use of films at fairs should be included in any serious history of film, as it was at these fairs that new film technologies were often featured, showcased, and put to use. It was also at these events that film serviced corporate and industrial interests, taking root as regularized and standard elements of business practice that continues today in the form of websites, immersive event sponsorships, and overtly promotional audiovisual content. If exhibitory uses of film are to be considered seriously, then industrial, governmental, and corporate communications practices must be taken into account. For instance, the well-known and innovative work of Charles and Ray Eames of the 1950s and 1960s cannot be understood without considering the crucial role that IBM and the State Department played in sponsoring their art.21 For decades, large American companies had already operated extensive internal and external communications programs that involved print, photography, and in some instances film, albeit with less direct engagement with what we might conventionally call art.22 Many companies printed internal bulletins and newsletters. Advertising in newspapers and magazines and increasingly on radio provided American industry and its products a steady presence in public life. Film was but one part in this rising media reality. Roland Marchand documents the undertaking of a specific kind of media use across a broad swath of American businesses during the 1930s. DuPont, United States Steel, AT&T, General Electric, and the major car manufacturers began to think anew about how to conduct and control public perception of company activity and impact, or what was termed “public relations.” In part as a rebuke to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and a fear that his government’s liberal policies would erode the autonomy granted private industry, corporations began to augment previous communication practices. Moving away from direct or didactic statements about particular

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products or processes, the new public relations strategy produced messages proclaiming industry (unbridled by government regulation) was an essential agent in building prosperous, inclusive, and moral ways of living.23 Increasingly, one could find on the pages of popular magazines, and across many other outlets, public relations campaigns extolling the importance of steel for building safe school buses and resilient bridges. Chemistry left behind the esoterica of the lab and became essential for bettering everyday life for all.24 Historian William Bird notes that a key part of this communications shift entailed where and in what form such messages appeared. American companies actively embraced popular media and its techniques, increasing their use of drama, personal narratives, and colloquial language. The tropes of entertainment combined with messages of how corporations—and not just their products—improved daily life for average people. Building on previous display practices that had long included dioramas, working models, photomurals, and actual re-creations of factory processes, American industry increasingly made use of magazines, radio, traveling exhibits, national and regional fairs, comics, and film to proclaim its benevolence and positive power to ensure prosperity.25 Employing film to tell generalizable stories (e.g., why oil is good for everybody), and also to sell specific products across a growing display infrastructure, appealed to a mushrooming number of manufacturers and retailers. This was true in part because this infrastructure gave them access to groups of people willing to gather attentively for a sustained show (audiences) but also because it allowed for new and sometimes automated ways of forwarding sales messages through narrative, movement, sounds, rhythm, visual effects, and projected light. In short, through many of the formal properties of cinema—understood by some as particularly effective at securing favorable consumer attention—films might change minds and behaviors. Expanded and adaptable cinema enabled the site-specific targeting of messages capable of addressing both attentive and distracted consumers wherever a projection device might be set up. These properties replaced what were previously live demonstrations or stage shows and offered the benefit of scaled economies supplied by centralized production, recording, and simplified performance requirements. Think of film projection as a kind of presentation software. Portable projectors also likely offered the basic appeal of novelty; they were purveyors of modern, illuminated messages that could appear on a wall, in a display window, on an office desk, or at a train or bus station! In addition to its use as an outward-facing public relations tool, film had long been appropriated by American industry for other purposes as

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well. This included improving worker morale and training.26 The electrical companies and automobile manufacturers were early adaptors and often blessed with deeper pockets than American educators, who were also interested in the pedagogical capacities of cinema. Partly because of the expense, educational film and media enthusiasts struggled throughout the decade.27 Industrial and business use, however, developed comparatively rapidly. A new chorus of advocates began to herald film’s ability to reach and influence millions of people effectively and efficiently. A slowly burgeoning network of screening venues and distribution and display infrastructures became valuable resources, creating access to audiences trained to sit through the whole of a given show (rather than walk by a poster or billboard or turn a page in a magazine). This growing platform combined with often unelaborated and thinly supported claims such as that cinematic language and address possessed “rare immediacy,” “force,” and “shades of meaning.” These declarations were likely more powerful because of the still-recent innovation of portable synch-sound projection.28 Tailor-made films supported carefully scripted sales pitches and standardized company platforms. They were decorated with music and a degree of professionalism that regional and local sales teams might lack or be incapable of replicating.29 Further, new modes of dissemination and display—such as the slowly growing network of 16 mm portable projectors—promised to strengthen existing circuits and operate as a cost-effective workaround of theater owners’ resistance to showing such films. Besides these impromptu and provisional projection scenarios at fairs or traveling shows, this film infrastructure also galvanized brick-and-mortar venues comprised of schools, civic clubs, and religious groups.30 These also became venues for industrial films. Finally, the use of film by American businesses throughout the 1930s is efficiently punctuated by the 1938 inaugural issue of the magazine Business Screen, a publication that was in print for decades thereafter. Largely funded by advertising from film technology firms and their close relations, Business Screen documented and advocated for thinking about film and a family of visual technologies as business machines. America’s most powerful corporations integrated film into multimedia public relations campaigns. Take but one example: General Motors (GM) had overtaken Ford as the leading American car manufacturer in 1929. The company had been especially active in public relations efforts during the 1930s, frequently not electing to trumpet cars or even to promote its brand, but to market the very idea of private enterprise itself as an engine of progress and a service to America.31 GM consistently promulgated “free opportunity, free initiative, free competition,” often independent from

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any particular car or manufacturing process.32 The company voraciously consumed film services during this decade. They issued contracts to both Audio Productions and Jam Handy to make its films, which at this time generally recorded in 35  mm but then issued prints in both 35  mm and 16 mm. It is estimated that Jam Handy completed as many as forty films for GM in 1937 alone.33 To be sure, GM had a well-developed film program with intraorganizational applications for film directed at worker training, morale, and loyalty. It also utilized films for its extended constituencies. For instance, GM had forty-two regional motor clubs equipped with 16 mm projectors. Managers, car dealers, and employees frequented club meetings, where films were shown.34 GM was also well known for its “Caravan of Progress” that evolved out of earlier fairs and began touring the United States in 1936, featuring glimpses of future and sometimes futurist products, including streamlined cars and buses, devices that emitted stereophonic sound, early televisions, and microwave oven prototypes.35 Films were a persistent element of such exhibits. Parallel to GM’s progress caravan, it commissioned A Car Is Born (Jam Handy, 1937), a film clearly and playfully titled to gesture toward Hollywood’s contemporaneous feature film, A Star Is Born (William Wellman, 1937), starring Janet Gaynor and Frederick March. A Car Is Born traveled the country with reportedly fifty different front men who worked to get the film seen in select venues; a team of projectionists trailed them to orchestrate booked shows.36 One estimate suggests that millions of people saw these films, which were plainly part of a more elaborate and crossmedia address orchestrated by GM.37 Between film and caravan, the company brokered in popular, often futurist, presentations and displays that drew crowds in large cities and small towns alike. Technological innovation became an attraction and a virtue, one supported by a proudly muscular industrial research and development program. Such activities build on what Ariel Rogers has sketched during the decade as a spreading network of moving screens, connected to trains, cars, buses, and occasionally airplanes.38 GM carried these practices and commitments into its fair activities, finding a comfortable home in New York’s “World of Tomorrow.” By 1939 when the fair doors opened, ongoing industrial display and performance practices further merged with a burgeoning American industrial film scene, one that was benefitting from a growing national viewing infrastructure for film presentation that made use of but also exceeded movie theaters. It also included the ascendant logics of public relations, which were not so much replacing but complementing industrial-process films and the folksy parables of modernization that had long been made

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and circulated by American car companies.39 The evolving language of public relations increasingly positioned American corporations at the center of American identity and favored terms like progress, research and development, science, technology, innovation, as well as safety, freedom, and prosperity. With this shift in corporate and industrial address firmly in place, the fair presented opportunities to interpret and express these terms by using the tools and techniques of grand industrial expositions. Growing and unprecedented expenditures on promotional displays and exhibits throughout the decade reached a climax in New York City, prompting the design and construction of signature buildings and monumental exhibits.40 The optimistic, technocratic, and futurist fair stood in stark defiance of the preceding decade of economic strife and New Deal government assistance. Eager to assert the capacities of unbridled corporate capitalism, the fair became a staging ground to prop up not only abundant products and the processes that made them but also to advance the worldviews fueling them. Cultural historian Warren Sussman shows that the 1939 World’s Fair in New York boldly continued the convention of all modern fairs: to display the triumphs of state, science, and industry. Initially conceived as a way to counter the lingering effects of the Great Depression in New York City, the fair was incorporated by individuals constituting an audacious display of wealth and power, including the heads of twenty-three banking and trust companies, fifteen Wall Street firms, and eight insurance companies. Presidents of such corporate behemoths as Standard Oil, General Electric, General Motors, CBS, and NBC, also served.41 Additionally, fifteen elected politicians joined the fair’s forty-six-member board of directors, including New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia. During this tumultuous period of American and indeed world history, the fair corporation and its administrators, as well as exhibitors, reassured visitors that after almost a decade of economic hardship and rising European conflict, government and industry were successfully building a new world. Industrial pavilions repeatedly extolled the virtues of technological innovation, corporate benevolence, abundance, and consumerism.42 Certainly, the event’s vast size meant that exhibits and concessions pursued this broad imperative in many ways, each differently shaping common cultural refrains. Robert Rydell and Christina Cogdell have shown that the fair inflected its utopianism with normative ideals of the body and the family, some of which were subtended specifically by eugenics and more generally by the racism that permeated the culture at large. The politics of gender in this future world yielded two very different kinds of women. One appeared as a kind of commodified spectacle enshrouded virtuously in a sanitized

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world of home appliances, convenience foods, and beauty products. The other was offered up as a kind of progressive and sexually liberated figure in the numerous nudie and peep shows that populated fair concessions.43 The “World of the Future” was predictably complex, inevitably burdened by contemporaneous prejudices and asymmetries. Despite the contradictions, general trends can be identified, including the prominent strategies of address employed by American corporations. Historian Roland Marchand argues that while fairs had, up until New York, regularly served as sites for businesses to sell their wares, the 1939 fair marked a clear shift away from an exclusive emphasis on the selling of things and toward the forwarding of a particular and carefully crafted corporate image.44 Resonating with the rising logics of public relations, companies such as General Motors, Ford, Westinghouse, RCA, and AT&T each commissioned monumental if temporary signature buildings that embodied their respective corporate visions. These structures employed the latest practices of industrial architecture: modern, streamlined, and efficient. In addition to architecture, contemporary techniques of exhibition design inside and outside of these buildings completed the vision. Whole building interiors and surrounding grounds became blank canvasses upon which to pursue the ideal of persuasive corporate communication. Film was but one part of this whole exhibition environment, one that didn’t just feature moving images but all manner of moving things. One study of this fair’s exhibition techniques indicates that 77 percent of exhibits utilized moving parts of some sort.45 Suitably, then, motion pictures, ever-changing projection slides, and vibrant lighting (particularly at night) appeared throughout the grounds. Buildings constructed of glass, exterior and interior moving platforms and ramps, and electrical staircases underscored the perpetual, controlled movement of all things at the fair: progress.

Industrial Showmanship Trained as an architect, Donald Deskey served as a prominent industrial designer who, alongside others, created the art deco interiors for Radio City Music Hall, which also held the largest movie theater in the world upon its opening late in 1932. Deskey worked on the prestige buildings and exhibits that populated the fairgrounds, including the Communications Building (figure 10). Film suited what he dubbed “industrial showmanship.” In 1938 he wrote: “Every device for the dramatic presentation of products and ideas is being probed. The motion picture is being used in many cases as an important part of the display. However, the use of the sound film alone in

figure10. Image of design for the interior of the Communications Building at the New York World’s Fair by Donald Deskey. Here a projector, housed inside the eye of a gigantic modernist sculpture of a human head, throws images onto an adjacent wall in a windowless exhibition hall. Evidence suggests that this hall was built using this design, but that the film screen was ultimately a rear-projection setup. Business Screen 1, no. 2 (1938): front cover.

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a standard theater setting is nothing new to the visitor from the crossroads. But as an instrument for the visualization of ideas, it is being incorporated into more elaborate mechanical devices; stage presentations for industry with the motion picture as an integral part.”46 Freed from the constraints of a theater, Deskey understood film as an important creative tool harnessed, along with others, to a sophisticated exhibitory environment. In this, he joined several other designers who held prominent fair commissions in New York. In addition to Norman Bel Geddes, discussed later, Walter Dorwin Teague is perhaps the most prolific, with seven major New York fair exhibits to his name. His commissions included work for Ford, Du Pont, United States Steel, Kodak, Texaco, and Consolidated Edison. Films and various moving projections were integrated into each of these pavilions. Teague himself called his exhibits “hit shows.” Anticipating phenomena like Disneyland, which would not follow for another sixteen years, these ideas envisioned not single media but whole environments, comprised of architecture, industrial design, exhibition design, and new and old media. A range of film technologies and techniques shaped the rising importance and imperative for American corporations to increasingly adopt the tools and techniques of showmanship.47

Films and Fairs Three World’s Fairs were held in the United States during the 1930s: Chicago World’s Fair “World of Progress” (1933), the San Francisco “Pageant of the Pacific” (1939), and the better known and much larger fair held in Queens, New York City, “The World of Tomorrow” (1939). Films and film screens played a role at each of these fairs. A few words about the Chicago fair helps to set an instructive stage for screen use in New York, demonstrating both continuity and change. The Chicago fair boasted a multitude of moving picture applications, extending to the use of film to record and monitor the movement of crowds around particular exhibits, an example of early consumer observation research.48 Nonetheless, the largest single use of film at the fair was advertising. The bulk of films shown at the fair promoted products spanning automobiles, pocket flashlights, alloy metals, radios, radio batteries, dentistry, travel, safety glass for cars, refrigerators, stoves, tires, newspapers, pianos, shoes, paint, tractors, canned food, bread, yeast, and steel. The advertising industry even conscripted film to promote itself. In 1933, the Advertising Federation of America and the American Association of Advertising Agencies made a film called “Golden Years of

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Progress,” shown at the Chicago World Fair (1933–34). The film extolled the virtues of advertising as an industry, contributing—so it was claimed— to a higher standard of living for all.49 Motion pictures were also purposed to implore fairgoers to see motion pictures.50 That is, Hollywood advertised at the fair in the best way it knew how. Portable projectors were amply dispersed throughout the grounds. Advantages included their light weight, the lower cost of prints and machinery, decreased fire hazard, ease of operation, and adaptability. Some of these projectors required an ever-present operator; many others did not, running continuously without intervention (figure 11). Ten projectors operated by direct audience intervention: push-button cinema. Of the one-hundred or so portable projectors at the Chicago fair, only six serviced conventional theatrical setups.51 On the whole, projector and screen placement varied considerably. Roughly one-third were hidden behind a wall, one-sixth were concealed by purpose-built cabinets, and one-sixth were placed in the open for all to see. Just over half of the small projectors utilized rear-projection technology—what were often called daylight film screens—in order to save space and to allow projection in full light, natural or artificial. Some other projection environments relied on mirrors or featured projectors mounted above the ceiling or beneath floors, in order to accommodate projection in very small spaces.52 Screen size also varied dramatically. Twenty percent of film screens at the fair were no more than twenty inches across; roughly half were smaller than forty inches. Only two screens were as wide as eight feet across.53 The small, portable projector and screen loomed large over the Chicago fair film scene. The largely nonfiction films shown served multiple functions. Many told stories about particular manufacturers and how their goods were made; others instructed salesmen or showed products in use. Thus advertising was pitched as education. Still others attracted passers-by to a specific exhibit, mimicking automated circus barkers. Two-thirds played to standing or moving people, while roughly a third of the projectors at the fair played to seated audiences, where seating capacity ran as low as 24 and as high as 224.54 Clearly the Chicago fair creates a quick portrait of a diversified film environment. Viewers walked by a screen far more often than they sat in front of one. The mystical beam of light that spans the screening space back-to-front was frequently resituated to come from below, above, or behind the screen. And the idea of a big, main attraction here is clearly incidental to a cinema that was small, provisional, and sometimes supplemental to other attractions.

figure 11. Beginning in 1938 and extending to 1940, portable projector manufacturers frequently paired their products with grand industrial exhibitions, regularly invoking fair iconography and rhetoric in advertising campaigns. Here a portable projector is pictured in a console to attract passersby. Its continuous operation in silent or sound mode is presented here as a reliable and essential tool for sales displays and exhibits. Its successful use at the Chicago Fair is offered as incentive for future use in New York. [Advertisement], Business Screen 1, no. 3 (1939): 47.

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While the San Francisco Fair of the same year did have several dedicated theaters and over one hundred 16 mm projectors in use, the New York fair was simply bigger and featured a cornucopia of moving-image technologies and related practices.55 By 1939, a well-established network of production companies emerged to create publicity and advertising films (Jam Handy and Audio Productions being key examples). By the end of the decade, advertising agencies had begun to open film divisions.56 The basic fact of film’s prominence at the fair featured in fair publicity. A press release just over a month before the fair’s opening day averred: “The wide-eyed movie fan might spend his entire time wandering from theater to theater at the New York World’s Fair 1939 and see everything from a full-length Hollywood feature to a foreign travelogue short without once opening his purse. The Fair corporation itself, the United States government, a number of states, a score of foreign nations and uncounted commercial exhibitors will utilize the moving image and the silver screen to an unprecedented extent to tell the story of their significance and amuse their admirers.”57 Grover Whalen, the fair’s president and public figurehead, exulted that at the fair a “new high mark in the use of motion pictures for educational purposes, for the betterment of living conditions, for the advancement of science, for the improvement of health, and for the distribution of the products of industry, will be reached.”58 Film, according to Whalen, worked in perfect harmony with the new frontier that the fair itself sought to realize: modern, moving, efficient, automatic, and electric.59 Film’s suitability to the fair’s themes manifested at multiple levels, from specific on-site event planning to generic, nationally circulated publicity. For instance, events at the fair were choreographed to facilitate recording by newsreel teams; crews were accommodated with special parking passes, advance notice of events and parade routes, suggested staging areas and shooting angles, and on-site lighting.60 Collins reports that “several thousand feet” of floor space were given over to newsreel crews in the Press Building.61 In addition to regular appearances in nationally distributed newsreels, fair administrators also made promotional movies. According to Collins, head of the fair’s film activities, the NY Fair was the first fair to do this.62 The fair’s official publicity film “Let’s Go to the Fair” (World Fair Corporation, 1939, 16 mm, sound, color) was disseminated nationally. Early in 1940, sixty-two prints of the film were in active circulation, facilitated by so-called nontheatrical powerhouses such as the YMCA (fifteen prints) and by regional distribution and projection services that supplied the film to clubs, schools, and civic groups. The tourism industry confirmed keen interest in the fair; the National Trailways bus company featured the official fair film daily in

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its Chicago hub.63 Two railroad companies paraded the film regularly at rail station theaters. It was also commonly shown at Grand Central Station (New York City).64 Besides making and distributing this widely seen film, the fair also maintained its own official movie theater that played select titles continuously throughout the fair’s operating hours. The schedule for the so-called “Little Theatre” appeared in the special fair supplement published by the New York Times daily. It was primarily at this theater that the fair established a reputation for its unprecedented, sustained, and concentrated display of educational, industrial, and documentary film. News of the fair’s nonfiction film offerings was also available in publications like Film News, which celebrated the “largest assemblage of nontheatrical films ever shown in one place at one time.”65 Local papers also published screening schedules and offered further comment.66 The Little Theatre, located in the Science and Education Building, sat 253 audience members. It ran a slate of some fortythree films, among them the well-known film made specifically for the fair, Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke’s 1939 The City (35 mm sound; shown twice daily, four days a week). Much heralded documentaries such as The Plow That Broke the Plains (Pare Lorentz, 35 mm, 1936) and The River (Pare Lorentz, 35 mm, 1938) also played. Hollywood expressed little interest in the fair.67 Though the film industry’s trade group, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), did commission Cecil B. DeMille to create a film about American history, drawing excerpts from Hollywood films. It could be viewed in the U.S. Federal Government Pavilion.68 At a glance, it seems that all manner of small and large, local and international exhibitors screened at least one film in theaters and exhibition spaces of varied sizes. This included local colleges and various representatives of the New York municipal system, such as the Fire Department and the Department of Sanitation. At least nineteen foreign governments also screened films. Among governments operating a theater were Britain, Brazil, France, Russia, and the United States. Each had large theaters with regular film screenings planned throughout the day. The British Pavilion featured 141 different films, Brazil 82, and France 72. Of the thirty-six commercial exhibitors using conventional theatrical settings, the largest theater by far was that constructed by General Motors, with a seating capacity of 612. Coca-Cola sat 350 in front of a ten-foot screen. Coty Inc. featured a 16 mm Kodachrome sound film with seating for 77. Fair authorities estimated that attendance for film screenings at all theatrical venues during the first year of the fair’s operation ran in excess of twenty million.69

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Well over five hundred films were shown on the grounds in the fair’s first year alone.70 Some of these films were commissioned specifically for the event, and many others were culled from growing industrial and state film libraries. Some used flashy techniques or enacted experiments on a grand scale in order to garner attention. For instance, Chrysler commissioned what became a popular 3D film entitled In Tune with Tomorrow, featuring a self-assembling car using stop-motion animation, discussed further below.71 Kodak’s Cavalcade of Color exhibit, also called Kodak’s “World of Color,” was dubbed “a quasi-motion picture technique,” and gained frequent mention in fair literature.72 It used eleven screens mounted side by side on a curved wall. Constantly changing Kodachrome slides emanated from an armada of synchronized, dissolving-slide projectors, yielding an automated, moving panorama measuring 180 feet wide and 20 feet high.73 A notched sound film ran the show automatically, dimming the lights, bringing them up, and coordinating everything in between, including the varied timing for each slide. The elaborate show was synchronized with music and a voiceover and made use of more than two thousand unique slides that at times displayed individual objects in isolation from other images, and at others combined to display integrated panoramas. The presentation resembled that of an illustrated lecture film: a script was delivered in an earnest, friendly baritone, supplemented with music at appropriate pauses. No seats were provided. Despite that, people came and stayed for the whole of the show, a fact that commentators considered a further tribute to its healthy appeal.74 Color film, a moving automated display, and a large-screen format combined to create an unusual and extremely popular attraction at the fair.75 Fred Waller oversaw the Kodak exhibit and at the same time developed Vitarama, a similar multiscreen system that employed moving rather than still images. Planned for installation inside the Petroleum Building, Vitarama did not ultimately appear at the fair though the idea of it was widely discussed and persisted for decades after.76 The curved Vitarama screen was intended to capture projections emanating from multiple, linked 16  mm projectors. Simultaneous to his Vitarama, Waller also helped to orchestrate a multiscreen installation in the fair’s signature Perisphere building, consisting of figures marching to the fair’s theme song. Waller’s fair work, some of which relied on portable projectors, underpinned his later work on the wide, curved, multiscreen exhibition environment that eventually became Cinerama in the 1950s, a development that led to a permanent change in the size and shape of commercial film screens.77 Experimentations in the World of Tomorrow employed multiple film technologies that

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recombined cinema’s expanding technical apparatus. Big and small, temporary and enduring, architectural and portable elements of that apparatus converged to shape moving images and their sounds for decades.

Films, Fairs, and Cars From multi- and widescreen installations to ad hoc, small, and incidental screens, many films played automatically and continuously without human intervention or other accompaniment. Beyond the more spectacular examples discussed above, film projections became small parts of shows and demonstrations otherwise comprised of live and partly automated elements. As noted in a contemporaneous report by Richard Griffith, several exhibitions featured films projected onto walls, atop maps, and as elements in multimedia live shows.78 The American automobile industry provides an exceptionally interesting and telling cross-section of the many ways in which film technologies were being put to use at the fair. These uses offer a compelling case for arguing that both small- and large-screened projections need to be examined side by side in order to reveal that logics of sales and persuasion wove many cinematic or exhibitory modes together into an intricate media ecology deployed by powerful interests. Orchestrated by Ford, GM, and Chrysler, film use ran the gamut from small and incidental to big and spectacular, shaping elaborate exhibits that, as Alice Goldfarb Marquis has claimed, “flamboyantly reflected the car’s central role in American life.”79 Long before the fair, Ford Motor Company began an in-house film program in 1914; General Motors began making sales and promotional films in 1924. During the 1920s and 1930s, all three auto companies utilized film in multifaceted ways: screen magazines, training films, worker education, publicity, exhibitions, and advertising. Some of these titles enjoyed broad release and appeared in commercial theaters. Some showed primarily in factories, car dealerships, or company social clubs; still others traveled to churches, men’s or women’s clubs, YMCAs, and schools. In addition to detailing the Ford program’s diverse approach to film use, Lee Grieveson demonstrates that the company’s films were among the most widely seen of the silent era.80 “Car movies” were a familiar genre to Americans who, during the 1920s and 1930s, saw the national highway program connect more and more communities, witnessed the first trends toward suburbanization, and drove to the first “car cinemas” (the first drive-in opened for business in New Jersey in 1933). Ford, Chrysler, and GM each projected films in theaters at the fair. They also employed film technologies to explore acoustic

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and spatially multidimensional exhibition techniques. Indeed, a family of technologies operated in a kind of partial and para-cinematic way, linking still and moving displays, flashing lights, and electrically amplifying sound in vast display environments. Collectively, this amounted to a corporate experiment, a new kind of interface between industrial and consumer desire. Cinema was a modern machine, creatively and imaginatively put in the service of other machines—in this case, automobiles—to induce both wonder and desire. Often the grandest of fair installations bore either direct or indirect relations to moving-image technologies and techniques. Consider Futurama: General Motors commissioned the prominent industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes to fashion what would become one of the most heralded exhibits yielded by the fair. Bel Geddes began his career as a stage and theater designer, crafting sets for several films as well.81 He was an advocate of new theatrical design, wherein American designers adapted aspects of the European avant-garde, working toward dissolving stark boundaries between audience and stage. Key features included the simplification of stage scenery and theater interiors and the use of inventive lighting and sound to create all-encompassing experiences. The latter of these plainly echoed the designs of avant-garde movie theaters more than a decade earlier.82 Through his theatrical work, Bel Geddes used dynamic lighting and moveable walls. He disregarded the proscenium arch. Such innovations carried over to his later work on shop windows and industrial and exhibition designs. Donald Albrecht described Bel Geddes’s designs as “theatricalized architecture” because of his attention to movement around and within spaces and for his attempts to dynamically engage people within those spaces.83 Futurama embodied many of Bel Geddes’s design principles, and then some. It featured a moving 1,586-foot “chair train” that mobilized thousands of seated spectators daily, carrying them through hundreds of connected and elaborately designed dioramas. The exhibit illustrated the highway-saturated future of 1960. Riders enjoyed aerial views of miniature highways and fifty thousand tiny cars, ten thousand of which zipped around the expansive installation. As the future was air-conditioned, riders enjoyed the fifteen-minute attraction in relative comfort, an especially welcome respite during New York’s hot summers. Futurama dynamically spatialized the relationship between spectator and spectacle, moving viewers through a stage whose beginning and end could not be easily framed or enclosed. Its use of moving miniatures created a streamlined future that positioned the car and its motorways as the primary organizing principle of American

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life. A dramatic voiceover helped to contain this roaming view, linking part to whole, traveler to journey, and diorama to event. This recording was secured optically on 150 unique filmstrips, and played from a nearby control room in accordance with where each group of four riders was in relation to the unfolding show.84 The ride combined the latest sound inscription, reproduction, and amplification technologies, the very ones being used in film theaters as well as in the new portable sound film projectors scattered across the fairgrounds.85 While Futurama was not the conventional apparatus we have long prized as film historians, technologies of cinema undeniably shaped the ride experience at its core. It embraced highly coordinated mechanical movement and reproduced sounds; its iconography echoed that of the much older ride films like Hale’s tours, and its emphasis on horizontality presaged the rollout of Cinerama’s widescreen, whose proprietary screen and films likened theatrical movie-watching to panoramic travel. Celluloid strips with recorded sound ran continuously throughout the ride. The soft, intimate, synched voiceover directed viewers in timed segments to look at relevant parts of the diorama on choreographed cue. It helped to contain and control where and for how long people looked, functioning to limit a potentially sprawling and expansive view. Futurama also literally became cinematic, as the exhibition was central to the subsequent General Motors film called To New Horizons (Jam Handy, 1940). The twenty-three minute futurist documentary fashioned the automobile and its highways-to-come as the peak of an evolutionary model of human transportation. The on-site fair exhibit was integral to the film, which included footage of the building’s entrance and relied heavily on the diorama, operationalizing its working models in the second half of the film. The film’s scripted narration was largely borrowed from the exhibit’s voiceover, itself mirrored in the souvenir pamphlet handed out at the fair.86 To New Horizons showed at the fair in its second year and was afterward subsumed by GM’s media library and public relations program. Distributed widely in 35 mm and 16 mm prints, at its core, this film was consonant with the logics of the GM exhibit. Also a public relations film, it was part of a campaign to normalize a particularly corporate form of urban planning. Importantly, calling for efficient, accessible, and elaborate highway systems implied that automobiles were necessary consumer goods and that observable socioeconomic disparity was inconsequential to infrastructural transformation. The displacement of poor, working, and minority families, a well-known consequence of highway construction, was nowhere to be seen.

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Beyond Futurama, GM also boasted the largest conventional theater at the fair with 650 seats, which provided the venue for several films as well as other kinds of performances. For instance, an animated short called A Coach for Cinderella (Jam Handy, 1936) was shown here. In this film, a GM car (rather than a horse-drawn carriage) is assembled by woodland creatures in order to rush Cinderella to the ball (figure 12). GM also showed ’Round and ’Round (1939), which used stop-action animation to tell the story of a business that made not cars but widgets. The film documented all phases of industrial production, from the sourcing of raw materials grown by happy farmers to the safe and steady manufacture of widgets by diligent workers and machines to the eager purchasing of the very same widgets by workers with their earned wages. All laborers were played by wooden toys. The film opens with a close-up of a spinning toy top, a telling and ostensibly innocent index to the industrial cycle depicted in the film. Upbeat music emulates a series of ringing bells and xylophones. Modern business is likened to child’s play and to benevolent, closed systems that please all.87 It is in this context that To New Horizons acquires poignant value within a diversified industrial film program that employed among its modes of address one that was clearly directed to children. Drawing on a number of animation techniques, miniature models, puppets, fairy tales and toys, many other films also invoked the whimsical tropes of family entertainment. Industrial work became fun, associated with happy play and bountiful wonderment. In other words, while some films and exhibits at the fair were addressed to adults, almost half were made to appeal to children.88 This was by no means incidental; capturing young audiences and gaining access to schools was a tactic aggressively encouraged in public relations literature of the time.89 While the address to children may have been relatively new for the burgeoning genre of industrial film, the role of film in invoking wonder was relatively common. For instance, Ford Motor Company featured a film entitled Symphony in F (Audio Productions, 1940), which depicted everyday scenes in a Ford factory enlivened by an animated sequence of marching purchase orders and happy toy-workers. The film includes a stop-motion animation segment of its most recent model car self-assembling without human or factory assistance. As with Futurama, the diorama built for the Ford exhibit became the setting for a prolonged segment of the film: the diorama’s miniature moving parts performed for the camera, constituting vignettes of a field laborer picking cotton, a man riveting a car part, an executive standing behind a desk, and a secretary powdering her nose. The film closes with a view to the whole of the mountain-shaped diorama, slowly turning in the Ford exhibit hall. Depicting an evolutionary narrative, the

figure 12. This add for Jam Handy, one of the leading industrial filmmakers, featured “A Coach for Cinderella” shot in Technicolor. The recent color process was not yet a regular aspect of feature filmmaking and was a “new” and novel aspect of all filmmaking during this period. The ad appeared on the back cover of Business Screen magazine claiming an audience of fourteen million. This was only the third issue of the new magazine. Its very formation indexes the growing field of industrial and business films. Business Screen 1, no. 3 (1938): back cover.

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story begins at the base. It enacts the procurement of raw materials (mostly from exoticized foreign locations with indigenous workers). The display then spirals upward toward the highly civilized industrial logics (and white workers) that directly result in the assembly of a finished car. The exaltation of global capital and its hierarchies of injustice were made compelling through technologies of miniaturization and cinema working in concert. Symphony in F functioned both as a stand-alone media text and as one integrally linked to a site-specific exhibit, extending that exhibit’s reach beyond the event itself. After New York industrial film libraries grew and continued to make such films available for free to civic associations, factories, schools, libraries, and labor and community groups. Magical cars were also commonplace at the fair. Each auto company— whether by animation or stop-motion—showed films in which automobiles miraculously became whole from parts. The theme of the magical automobile with the powers of self-construction resonates with the insight of Marchand, who has suggested that such magic was a common element of fair attractions.90 Perhaps nowhere was this industrial magic more fully evident than in Chrysler’s 3D film, which became known as the most popular and most spectacular film at the fair. In Tune with Tomorrow (John Norling, 1939), billed as “10 Minutes of Magic,” was one part of a five-part exhibit or, as Chrysler called it, a “Five Star Show.” The show featured a “Rocket Port of the Future,” which itself contained a fifteen-minute sound film entitled “History and Romance of Transportation” (figure 13). The film appeared on a large silhouetted map of the world. A live on-stage rocket launch served as a finale for the film. Richard Griffith notes that as the film was incomplete without the live launch, it was essentially useless for post-fair viewing.91 Yet, it remains a compelling example of the ways that “incomplete” films formed smaller elements of whole hybrid industrial performances. It is also worth noting that live sound effects were also used. Another section of Chrysler’s five-part exhibit featured a “Miracle Plymouth,” billed as a “talking car” that responded to questions and claimed to perform “amazing feats of magic.” Chrysler’s 3D film, In Tune with Tomorrow, ran for a total of seventeen minutes and began with a 2D, seven-minute didactic introduction by Major Bowes, a popular radio host who explained how the 3D effect was achieved. The 3D portion of the film begins with a shot of the half-mile-long assembly line at a Detroit-based Plymouth plant. It then quickly carries viewers to the story’s main stage, where each part of the soon-to-be car is animated by stop-motion. For roughly ten minutes, viewers watch as the various elements of the car fly toward the screen and then seemingly beyond it, eventually

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figure 13. Postcard from the 1939 World’s Fair. An on-stage rocket launch completes a short film on the history of transportation, projected onto a giant, wall-sized map. Author’s collection.

settling into a completed on-screen vehicle. The bits and pieces zoom through the air to upbeat, peppy music written specifically for the film.92 Visitors to the exhibit donned bi-colored glasses, shaped like the front grill of a car, with lenses where the headlights would normally be. The eyewear doubled as a souvenir; viewers were encouraged to take the glasses home. Apparently, the stereoscopic effect succeeded, though the appeal was often described with a familiar if contradictory pull between pleasure and pain. One viewer reported: “You [still] hear the howls of delight when a cam shaft hits you in the eye.”93 According to statistics issued by the fair, the Chrysler theater was the busiest of all exhibits, with a frequently filled auditorium. Several sources describe a “waiting line for every performance,” and the theater was in continuous operation from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. An estimated twelve thousand per day watched the seventeen-foot-wide screen.94 In Tune with Tomorrow clearly furthered the fair-wide appeal to magic and wonder through its use of novel display technologies and techniques; car and screen were mutually enchanted. It should also be pointed out that this film, along with the other car films discussed, presented a vision of laborless production and fantastical, automatic assembly. Sidestepping a decade of labor strife, these films celebrated showy cinematic techniques likely appealing more to management than to workers, who were no doubt less charmed.

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figure 14. Souvenir glasses for Chrysler’s 3D film show were handed out at the screening. Text on the reverse side celebrated the “greatest thrill in movies” and the “greatest thrill in motor cars.” Author’s collection.

Small Screens and Worlds of Wonder The notable increase in film use over that of previous fairs was aided by the proliferation of 16 mm portable projectors. Contemporaneous reports vary on precisely how many, and where, projectors were located across the fairgrounds. Available evidence indicates that 16 mm projection equipment outnumbered 35 mm by ratios of 10:1 to as much as 20:1.95 This discrepancy aside, portable film projectors undoubtedly increased and also ushered in diverse scenarios in which a broad spectrum of films and film extracts were shown. Thus, beyond the more spectacular environments addressing fairgoers as bedazzled consumers resides a somewhat humbler iteration of cinema’s selling machine: the small film screen. Despite the thirty-four different dedicated auditoria that showed films throughout the fair’s typical day, many more small portable projectors operated throughout the fairground, animating small theaters, restaurants, outdoor gardens, open-air theaters, and individual projection rooms, as well as “various other unique locations.”96 According to Business Screen, one hundred thirty-odd small projectors operated on a near-continuous basis ten to twelve hours per day, seven days a week. Still another source indicates that roughly 75 percent of these small projectors operated not just continuously but automatically, without the intervention of an ever-present projectionist.97 Some of these diminutive screens measured no more than twelve inches wide. Some worked as rear-projection devices. For instance, at the Chicago fair, twenty such rear-projection units appeared throughout the fairgrounds promoting

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current fair events and showing fairgoers at one location what was happening at another.98 In New York, while some spectators sat, many stood or simply walked by moving images. A panoply of projection technologies illuminated mannequins, multiscreen installations, and large improvised screens such as ceilings. One exhibit placed a small screen underneath a thin sheet of water in order to create the illusion of viewing magnified cells in water.99 To be sure, portable film projectors predictably showed old American silents in the concession area, but they also performed other more surprising functions such as providing a rolling text panel to accompany exhibits, replacing conventional didactic labels.100 The broader context for the use of these smaller devices is elaborated throughout the pages of Business Screen, which began publication in 1938, less than a year before the fair opened its gates. The magazine normalized new purposes for portable film, projectors, and screens in the context of day-to-day business and retail operations. In the first issue of the magazine, Gilbert Rohde, a regular contributor, rather accurately predicted: “I think that the motion picture will be taken as a matter of course in selling in the future. No one will think of planning an office without a projection screen in comfortable view of the executive’s desk.” For the business world, he declared, film is on the “threshold of discovery as a new medium.”101 Many of the articles possessed a noteworthy technological zeal, celebrating the many virtues of small-film technologies largely construed as business machines. Advertising for small and portable film technologies, as well as editorials and feature articles, filled the magazine, crafting cinema as a natural salesman. Phrases such as “salesmanship in a can,” “sells with the pace of today,” and “dynamic messaging,” appear throughout its pages, proclaiming the supremely effective expression afforded by this so-called new medium. Portable projectors, marketed specifically to salesmen, were also declared a magical modern aid to selling. For instance, the 16 mm DeVry “Challenger” harnessed the might of a “machine-powered salesforce.” Using the tagline “momentum,” the projector was likened to a rushing locomotive forcing its directed light beam—wherever you willed it to appear—to blast through a potential buyer’s inertia the same way a train bursts through a static landscape (figure 15).102 It should be no surprise that the magazine took great interest in the fair and devoted its second full issue to the event. Business Screen hosted a range of advertisements and articles about machines that sell: some featured motion pictures with and without sound; others featured film slides with sound. A conventional sound projector, the 16 mm Victor Animatograph “All in One,” also known as the Victor 33, invited “industrial and commercial users to more profitably employ the

figure 15. The DeVry Challenger promised to imbue all tactics of selling with the precision and focus of a powerful locomotive slicing through space and time. Business Screen 1, no. 5 (1938): 29.

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greatest of all modern sales tools.” A sound projector, the “All in One” announced that it was compact and self-contained during operation. It came with a “small handy microphone” providing “loud speaker facilities for sales talks, announcements, comments and demonstration spiels.” It also included a “phono-record turntable” to provide musical background for silent films or “for entertainment during reel changes, banquets, etc.” This device, reissued as the Victor 40 and renamed the “Add a Unit,” espoused an enhanced modularity and adaptability that responded to growing needs. A projector marketed to salesmen, it was created to perform multiple functions, including serving as a stand-alone sound machine. Showing a film was but one manifestation of the machine’s utility to the more general task of modern multimedia selling. Similar products such as the “Explainette,” the “Illustravox” (figure 16), and the “Automotion” machine were sold to retailers and merchandisers as in-store display devices. These were automatic image machines intended to enhance on-site selling techniques. Some of these required the constant control of an operator; others were fully automatic. The Flolite (figure 16), for instance, was a stand-alone unit that claimed to be a “miniature theater,” allowing “brilliant pictures even in broad daylight.” It was a rear-projection console system operating with a looping mechanism that allowed the device to repeat a film as many times as desired. The screen was quite small at twelve by fifteen inches.103 The unit weighed eighty-five pounds and was sold as suitable for “retail, food, drug and cigar stores, department stores, car depots, window and store displays, hotel, theater and club lobbies, conventions, public buildings and numerous other similar places.”104 One of the more interesting and less understood aspects of portable film devices is the use of rear projection. Such machines proliferated at the fair and elsewhere during this period precisely to overcome the challenges of daylight projection—that is, to use in spaces with variable or uncontrollable light. Conventional projector and screen relations dictated a projector on one side of the room and a screen on the other; they also required spaces that were free of visual impediments such as columns. Rear-projection units promised to operate regardless of environmental variables. A projector fixed behind the screen was contained by a console to prevent environmental light or any other obstructions from negatively affecting a viewer’s ability to discern and easily see an image. While this limited audience size, it also effectively enabled unit operation anywhere the box could be placed and powered.

figure 16. Flolite (left) and Illustravox (right). Stylish and modern, the Flolite was a rear-projection console device, designed to allow for projected moving images anywhere they were desired without the pesky interference of ambient light or structural impediments. Business Screen 1, no. 1 (1938): 8. The Illustravox was a desktop and tabletop sales device which could either work as a rear projection or regular projection device. With a plug-in phonograph player, it could provide a silent or sound presentation. Business Screen 1, no.8 (1939): 5.

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The application of rear-projection logics to create cinema consoles for daylight viewing was by 1939 reasonably common; rear-projection units were found in train stations, nightclubs, and diners, and used for advertising, product demonstration, and stock quotes throughout the United States.105 During the war these same devices were used to recruit soldiers, sell war bonds, and forge new genres of automated audiovisual entertainment. Notable among these were musical shorts (Soundies), as Andrea Kelley has shown.106 Such booths were operating in the United States, as well as in Britain and Germany since at least the early 1930s.107 They were also amply evident at the New York World’s Fair. In his report cataloging and commenting on fair films, Richard Griffith repeatedly mentions “booth projected” films and offers opinions on this specific mode of display. His comments assert that daylight booths were the optimal choice for a particular kind of film, preferably short, “sensationalist,” and “lithographic,” by which he seems to have meant films that borrowed from the sparser graphic principles of modern poster design. He deemed more didactic and lengthy films best left to conventional projection scenarios.108 He cited the poster films of the Empire Marketing Board as positive examples of this daylight cinema—short films that worked with clean, simple lines.109 Most “booth films” were looped, running continuously without need of constant operator attention. This moved film projection away from the formality of a film show and toward the informality of a busy thoroughfare, inviting a peripatetic and distracted viewer or, at best, a temporarily attentive one.110 The Business Kodascope, first marketed in 1928, was another kind of smaller viewing box, which Kodak claimed could be carried like an “average sample case.”111 The screen reflected light in the normal way, but, because it was translucent, the projected image could be seen from either side, front or back.112 The Kodascope further promised quick setup (less than half a minute), adaptability to all modern offices (including those fully lit and with glass partitions), and a screen five-and-a-half inches by seven inches that Kodak suggested was large enough, considering the “close range at which it is viewed” and comparable to “a full-page illustration in the average-size book.”113 Kodak claimed that the projector and bulb were sufficient to illuminate a thirty-inch by forty-inch screen, thus rendering the device adaptable, good for “a one-man audience or a group.”114 In Kodak’s advertising, the machine was frequently displayed atop a desk. Another rear-projection business machine was “the Merchandiser,” a small, tabletop or mounted rear-projection screen that used 16 mm film. Resembling a photographic camera, the screen was housed in a cone that emulated a large lens jutting out from the box (figure 17). Operating

figure 17. The Merchandiser, manufactured by Akeley Leventhal. It was sold as a nimble, continuous-operation device that was small and made to be mounted in a variety of locations. Its diminutive screen showed rear-projected moving images to help maintain efficiencies in retail spaces while employing forward-facing selling techniques. Sales pamphlet (circa 1939). Author’s collection.

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automatically on a loop, the portable machine repeated a short message over and over again. Its small size and self-contained setup meant that it could be placed anywhere in any kind of retail space: in a window, on a counter, in a showroom, alongside another display, day or night. Its sales literature highlighted this flexibility, and its manufacturer, Akeley-Leventhal, also claimed superior reliability, smooth operation, and easy film changes.115 Montgomery Ward department stores used the device throughout its national chain. While film technologies helped to sell store merchandise, Montgomery Ward and Sears both used their widely distributed catalogs to also sell film technologies, continuing a several-decades-long practice.116 Back at the fair, the smallest of these film devices integrated screens into product displays in some unusual ways. For instance, the makers of Bromo Seltzer placed a small, rear-projection unit inside an oversized bottle of antacid.117 These cinema gadgets were deeply imbricated in consumerist cultures. Perhaps best known of the rear-projection systems was one developed by Trans-Lux, a company that operated a small theater chain specializing in newsreels. These theaters relied on 35  mm films and special lenses so that the projector could operate at close range—behind rather than in front of the screen—and yet project an image up to twenty feet wide. An extra benefit was the ability to repurpose inexpensive and small spaces that didn’t need to be fully darkened and did not require elaborate projection booths.118 One of three newsreel chains in the 1930s and 1940s, Trans-Lux Corporation began in 1923 as the Trans-Lux Daylight Picture Screen Corporation. Its initial business concept was simple: projecting all manner of information (words, numbers, images) in full light. The company’s first innovation was a “Movie Ticker” at the New York Stock Exchange, which projected the small, constant flow of stock information on ticker tape. Douglas Gomery indicates that in the context of the roaring 1920s, this particular application proved very successful.119 When Trans-Lux diversified and opened its first dedicated newsreel theater in 1931, repurposing its business screen for pictorial rather than numerical content, the business model was quite different from the palaces that so dominate our imagination of the theatrical landscape during the 1920s. Trans-Lux Theaters often rented spaces rather than building or buying them. Its theaters had significantly smaller seating capacity than their picture palace peers, generally projecting for fewer than two hundred customers. Adopting rear-screen projection also advantaged them by allowing house lights to be kept partially on to minimize the need for ushers. Shows ran continuously; theater traffic was utterly flexible and staggered according to the foot traffic that characterized the theater’s urban locations.120 Several such theaters operated in major cities throughout the

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East Coast and at least one was in Times Square until the early 1960s.121 Fair exhibitors built upon the Trans-Lux system and idea, which was merchandized by a cluster of interests during the 1930s to businessmen, small and large companies, department stores, traveling salesmen, and all manner of exhibitors as the ultimate business machine. The General Cigar Company promoted the Trans-Lux system at the fair with a teletype machine that flashed world and sports news every minute, performing as a high-tech, moving, opaque projector brokering in up-to-the-minute information.122

Toward Cinema’s Future Throughout the 1930s, American businesses and industries developed and marketed small film projectors and screens for varied purposes. Presence at an event like the World’s Fair announced their arrival as an official instrument of industrial showmanship, exhibition, and public relations practices on the grandest and most boldly experimental of scales, as well as the smallest and most commonplace. To be sure, cinema at the New York World’s Fair constitutes an exceptional event, building on previous activity while also signaling the way toward future trends. In the postwar period, the use of film and many other screened, projected forms at exhibitions and expositions continued to grow and diversify. Indeed, the lavish role of small machines and big ones in 1939 indexes a pivotal way in which moving images and the many technologies that facilitated their performance were being harnessed to the imperatives to sell and persuade. This was accomplished both through techniques specific to what I am calling “exhibitory” impulses in film’s unique expressive capacities (spectacle, narrative, visual effects, synch sound), as well as by conveying cinema’s specificities to hybrid media spaces and experiments in industrial design, such as Futurama. In stark contrast to Hollywood’s theatrical model, the apparatus itself was sometimes part of the show. Its status and visibility as a modern media machine were part of its performative appeal. In some instances, this plainly entailed disarticulating what we commonly think of as the cinematic apparatus and rearticulating it to pursue many other display and performance scenarios that thrived far beyond the movie theater. Portable film projectors aided corporate profiteering at the fair. Business interests seeking to master a changing audiovisual landscape harnessed the powers of light and dark, sound and silence to their respective agendas. This convergence also demonstrates the powerful adaptability of celluloid, projector, and screen, which together promoted not just film technologies but all technologies—automobiles, refrigerators, electricity, radios, televisions,

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cameras. The “World of Tomorrow” was conceived as a corporate, governmental, and technological utopia wherein alliances across machines came to aid and abet a distinct exhibitory ethos. This iteration of corporate and industrial display—multidimensional and highly adaptable to varied spaces and purposes—pronounced a common sense for an emergent kind of technological environment in sometimes fantastical but also banal terms. This other kind of cinema provided a new set of materials not just for artists or the entertainment industry but for all industries. Advertising, industrial, business, and public relations films were part of this broader family of technologies and techniques that cannot be readily understood without considering the unique media ecology and distinct kinds of media texts generated within it. Michael Cowan has written about the clear overlap between canonical experimental filmmakers like Walter Ruttman and the developing field of motion picture advertising, showing the ways in which strands of contemporary psychology and ideas about attention shaped film experiments in the field of advertising in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, fully in dialogue with proliferating mobile screens.123 In the American context, the experimental impulse to join the worlds of moving pictures and advertising is similarly and deeply revealing of the ways in which films and film technologies were being integrated by disciplines other than those we easily and readily associate with cinema: architecture, commercial exhibition practices, industrial design, corporate speech, advertising, merchandising, and publicity. This brief glimpse of the World’s Fair illustrates that thinking about portable film technologies serves us well in assessing the ways in which the languages, technologies, and practices of film were being generously appropriated by other disciplines in service of their dreamworlds. At the fair, small projectors were common, augmented by other technologies of showmanship and display and anchored to spatial, ecological, and spectatorial conditions hitherto underexplored. This includes but is not limited to salesrooms, shop windows, desktops, boardrooms, department stores, factory floors, fairs, and expositions. Thinking about the fair confirms that portable film technologies promised uniquely cinematic properties while also indicating that this expanding moving-image apparatus could be easily adapted to multimedia installations seeking to sell, persuade, and convince. These other contexts, and their technological and performative modes, aid us in identifying the stylistic and formal properties of these films. They also remind us that examining such films must include considering the short, the small, the looped, the spectacular, the banal, the complete, the partial, and the complementary. It further requires us to learn more about the fields of industrial and graphic design and the

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long history of exhibition techniques broadly defined. Lastly, increasing the methods for investigating this rich area will productively insert cinema into other related visual and audile strategies, cross-media modes of advertising, techniques of selling, and the history of business and efficiency machines, where it has clearly had a long life and a lasting impact.

3. Mobilizing Portability The American Military and Film Projectors

The varied uses of film by American industry, undergirded by the development and spread of portable equipment throughout the 1930s, culminated in the elaborate display and performance scenarios of the 1939 World’s Fair. The fair’s theme, “The World of Tomorrow,” held together an agglomeration of imperatives. Prominent among them was the role that technological innovation and free enterprise would play in ushering the Unites States toward greater prosperity and away from the difficulties of the Great Depression. Film and film technologies serviced this vision across the fair’s vast exhibitory environment. While public performance and exhibition strategies had historically been used to present similar messages at fairs and expositions, here cinema played an especially notable and diversified role, ranging from the conveyance of simple information to the execution of grand spectacle. Technicolor, 3D, multiple screens, and an army of small projectors—silent and sound—combined to offer a new kind of industrial language, one that called forth a future constituted by moving images, amplified sounds, and projected light. The fair punctuated a decade in which portable film technologies had grown in their importance to American industry, serving an expanding set of needs: intraorganizational communication, workplace efficiency, training, sales, public relations, and what was at decade’s end being called “industrial showmanship.” These industrial and business-based uses of film rose on the tide of technological improvements to portable equipment. Projectors became more varied (smaller, bigger), played films with synchronized sound tracks, and were integrated into a fuller range of consoles and rear-projection units. They also continued to operate in concert with other media (public address systems, microphones, phonographs, photography, television). These developments in film technology and practice 110

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provided the conditions in which portable projectors became integral to modern organizational operations, and were increasingly normalized as elements of everyday life. That is, the technological and organizational expertise that evolved to support the industrial use of film and, to a lesser degree, the educational use of film became the seedbed for an unprecedented use of film and film technology by the American military during World War II and after. One example here at the outset can illustrate some of the often surprising, widespread, and assorted uses of film technologies by the American armed forces. In 1954, the US military commissioned the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the official and most powerful American film trade and corporate lobbying organization, to examine the film and photography operations of its various branches. The study sought to identify efficiencies in current activities across the military and, among other things, to explore the advisability of fuller, deeper collaborations between the military and Hollywood. The report painted a remarkable portrait of military film activity. Distribution and exhibition systems were vast and highly developed, with over one thousand film libraries housing tens of thousands of film prints. Hollywood studios and film production companies such as Jam Handy and Audio Productions supplied some of these films; many more were made by a kind of tributary system comprised of hundreds of internal military production units and a major film studio situated in Queens, New York. Orientation, training, and morale films, a few of which were made by known Hollywood directors, made up an estimated 15 percent of military film use. Some 75 percent of film and photography use was strictly of a strategic nature. In other words, the majority of film activity served applied military functions: ordnance testing, aerial and underwater reconnaissance and mapping, operating manuals, tactical support to combat missions, battle-front briefs, research and development, and data recording and analysis.1 The American military ballooned in size during World War II. Enlisted soldiers numbered under two hundred thousand in 1939 and increased to sixteen million at war’s peak.2 As such, vectors of film use were frequently directed inward to service rapidly proliferating military personnel and expanding intraorganizational exigencies. Cinema performed predictable tasks such as entertaining war-weary soldiers and providing the enlisted with information about how to avoid becoming ill or injured. Movies also helped fighting men to heal from the physical and psychological traumas of war.3 Films and film technologies were also directed to build efficient operational and bureaucratic systems. Individual titles served as reports,

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bulletins, updates, and memos that circulated according to differing security clearances, sensitivity of topic, and nature of content. Some of these films were seen by millions, others only by those at the highest levels of command. A bevy of titles contributed to a massive educational and training program for ensuring that jobs were effectively executed. Organizational uses of film also supported more conventional ideas of achieving military advantage and became part of top-secret and highly strategic activities. These entailed filmed content for interactive gunnery training devices to help prepare pilots, equipping planes with film and photographic equipment for surveillance, and the use of film to record and analyze munitions testing. Film and photography were crucial tools in the development and use of weapons, from the standard-issue rifle to the world-shattering atomic bomb.4 The military’s filmmaking, distribution, and application of films also maintained strong vectors outward, with footage regularly supplied to the commercial film industry during the war and then also the television industry after the war. Industrial incentive, public safety, and civilian preparedness films circulated in schools, public libraries, workplaces, and community centers. Such films could also be seen in veterans organizations, boardrooms, government offices, and countless other private and public forums, enabled by an increasing number of portable film projectors and screens. The military had a regular broadcast television program as well, assembled from its burgeoning stock footage and film library, that ran from 1951 to 1964 and appeared in syndication until 1970.5 Military-made or military-commissioned films were readily available to audiences across multiple platforms during the war and beyond, often servicing overlapping goals of entertaining, educating, and proclaiming the virtues and power of the military and its activities.6 Portable projectors were but one gear of an expansive militarized media machine. We know that the history of radio, television, computer, and internet technologies all have extended and intricate relationships to the American military.7 This chapter charts some of the deep and steady relations that film and film technologies have had to the American military, with particular attention paid to portable projection devices. The American military grew notably in the late nineteenth century, following the close interrelations of economic and political interests that supported US expansionism, particularly in Latin America. World War II played a central role in securing the dominant and enduring place of the military in American foreign policy. It also anchored the military’s function as a force for technical and industrial innovation more generally, a well-known phenomenon commonly referred

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to as “the military-industrial complex,” so-named by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1961. Lesser known is that the conflict hosted noteworthy innovations in film technologies which were themselves closely linked to a tide of wartime discoveries in chemistry, physics, and aerospace. Driven by the imperatives of industrial warfare, new cinema technologies developed and were deployed across the branches of the military. Along with other media forms, from disposable novels to microfilmed mail, the American military normalized and incorporated filmmaking, film projection, and film viewing into many of its operations. Looking specifically at film performance and viewing, most of the new scenarios bore little resemblance to the movie theater upon which Hollywood had built its fortunes. It is true that the Army erected an elaborate chain of movie theaters and conducted regular film shows for enlisted men largely comprised of Hollywood films.8 Nevertheless, the military also boldly disassembled commercial cinema’s settled routines and structures, rearticulating film projection as an essential element in a rapidly spreading institution. Indeed, portable projectors acquired an important and recognized role across military operations. Testifying to this, in 1944, the familiar image of soldiers gathered for a portable show was recognized by the US Post Office, which issued a stamp illustrating servicemen in the South Pacific watching a movie (figure 18). Like previous practices and protocols related to portable projectors, military film activity did not unfurl as any kind of rebuke to Hollywood. Rather, it marched in step with those companies that constituted the film industry’s technical base. Operating immediately adjacent to Hollywood, these companies actively influenced the design and manufacture of military equipment. Eastman Kodak, Bell and Howell, Victor Animatograph, Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and others worked through the Society for Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE), the official professional organization for the industry’s technical wing. The SMPE gathered together electrical and sound engineers, chemists, physicists, theatrical technicians, and film stock and equipment manufacturers, among others. SMPE members established technological standards for meeting evolving industry needs. They maintained stability and stimulated innovation across all segments of the film industry.9 During the war, they did the same for the military, authoring design protocols for film equipment targeted to surfacing demands. These same companies also sold their products to the military, helping to lock down the place of cinema as a tool of military operations, while simultaneously ensuring that their own interests would thrive during the war and beyond. In addition, the production companies that had grown to make

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figure 18. Even before war’s end, portable film shows had already become part of widely circulated, government-sanctioned war imagery. In 1944, the US Postal Service issued a stamp, commemorating the “50th Anniversary of Motion Pictures,” which depicted soldiers watching an outdoor movie in the South Pacific on an improvised screen. The 16 mm projector was not pictured but implied. Author’s collection.

films for the business, industry, and education sectors were also quickly conscripted to make films for the military. This chapter surveys military experiments with, and applications of, film and film projection during and after World War II, focusing on the importance of portable 16 mm projectors. “Projection” here is understood broadly to mean the performance and display of images—and sometimes sounds— recorded on and delivered by celluloid, normally shown on a screen. The use of the term projection is not confined to familiar ideas about a “film show” or “film exhibition.” Rather, this chapter explores the many ways in which the American military aggressively expanded what it meant to show and to watch films. These experiments involved a variety of screen sizes and audiences, and they were integral to the making and use of a surprising assortment of films serving diverse purposes. Sprawling film use was in part facilitated by spiraling organizational needs and largely powered by industrial and technological advances. It was shaped by the regular military practice of partnering film projectors with other media devices not conventionally considered cinematic: microphones, consoles, electromagnetic interfaces, data machines, and multimedia war rooms. Like American industries

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before them, the military believed that portable film projectors made them more modern, efficient, and effective. This idea not only reflected the widespread use of sounds and images across American industry, business, education, and cultural organizations, but, more critically, acted to rocket this trend to new heights. Important here is that the military’s cinema apparatus was determinedly elastic, disavowing any interest in a singular effect or application. Some portable projectors became key elements of standard military operations and workaday machines; others were more experimental or specialized. The term cinema here, then, is not used to designate a group of film texts or one particular viewing scenario but more to delineate a mode of institutionalized visualization and viewing, one that entailed a family of technologies, spaces, and discourses. This chapter charts military experiments with, and uses of, film projection, contextualizing these within the broader uses of cinema by the military during World War II. The military’s relations with the American film industry and its adjacent industries ensured the increasing use of film technologies in war and eventually in peace.

Hollywood and the Military Several prominent and well-documented fronts formed on which Hollywood studios strived to support the American effort during World War II. This includes an active relationship with the Office of War Information (OWI), technically a civilian or government and not a military agency. The OWI oversaw its Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP), which liaised with the studio’s War Activities Committee (WAC) to shape the content of Hollywood films during the war in accordance with wartime policies. During this period, “war movies” constituted a prominent production cycle, with war-related themes appearing regularly in other genres as well. Newsreels were another widely seen kind of war reporting, many of which were made by studio production units and shown as part of a commercial theater’s program.10 Beyond shaping the content of an evening’s entertainment, the OWI’s BMP secured the assistance of Hollywood’s WAC to make certain that government-made films related to the war would be distributed throughout the extensive circuit of commercial movie theaters in the United States.11 In addition, stars performed in live shows that raised money for the war effort and entertained soldiers to boot. With regard to the military proper, various departments within the armed services supported studio film production by providing film footage and access to military bases and equipment.12

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Disney made dozens of training, information, and morale films for the military. The fledgling studio was so important to the war effort that it was designated an official “war production plant” by the government.13 Thousands of those employed by the industry signed up for service, even marquee directors who made films within and for the military. Key among them was Frank Capra, who oversaw the iconic film series Why We Fight, shown as orientation films to the millions of the enlisted. John Ford, John Huston, and William Wyler also made military films, including what Thomas Doherty has categorized as “combat reports,” which functioned as a kind of audiovisual magazine for military personnel. The reports used battlefront footage and provided structured and often dramatic summaries of particular battles or actions in specific theaters of operation.14 Many other filmmakers made lesser-known films, including documentarist Pare Lorentz, who recorded top-secret surveillance films for the Army. From airplanes, he surveilled “the airways of the world,” charting enemy territory and otherwise providing materials that supported strategic analysis.15 Before the war, Hollywood had been donating film prints to entertain soldiers. Showing studio films was deemed a strategic component of military management, serving not just as recreation but as a rationalized effort at morale building, widely understood to ensure better soldiering. During the war, the circulation and showing of 35 mm prints continued, especially in domestic military movie theaters. Yet the smaller, less expensive, and more portable 16 mm gauge was officially deemed the standard for all nondomestic film activity, an important classification, given that the war was entirely fought outside US borders, Pearl Harbor notwithstanding. This specific designation spawned the development, production, and procurement of portable sound projectors, still a fledgling military technology. Accordingly, Hollywood donated 16 mm prints (reduced in size from 35 mm) of feature-length entertainment films to the military for its expansive overseas screenings program. These activities fell under the Overseas Motion Picture Service (OMPS), itself a unit of the Army’s communications department, the Signal Corps. Confirming the scope of this film program, reports indicate that by early 1946, 43,406 feature pictures and 33,236 shorts had been donated by Hollywood to the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. The numbers for this one military film program alone are surprising, with other reports indicating that at war’s peak as many as two million of eight million active-duty men attended more than six thousand performances in any given week.16 Reports on daily attendance throughout the life of the OMPS varied, ranging from 10 to 25 percent of enlisted personnel daily, much higher than for civilian viewers.17 Before their domestic premiers, a select

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group of Hollywood films were even seen by soldiers first, in response to complaints from servicemen that they were getting “old” films.18 Hollywood received special status during the war in recognition of its various wartime efforts. This status provided a number of exemptions to conscription, as select studio talent were allowed to stand down from duty in light of Hollywood’s importance for American morale. Studios had also been exempted from severe controls imposed on basic materials and were largely allowed to continue commercial operations with only minor economies required. Civilian theaters received guidelines to conserve materials and protect equipment through good maintenance practice but remained open and busy.19 Film stock had been restricted based on wartime needs. While Hollywood initially did with less, such controls did not negatively affect its operations or its bottom-line.20 This story about Hollywood and the war sketches an important dimension of the relations among known and powerful elements of the American film studios, the government, and the military. Equally important for understanding the history of portable projectors is the intricate history of the military’s interest in film technology and the expansive uses to which film technologies and films were put.

Film Technology and the Military During the 1940s, the tools of photography and filmmaking were boldly militarized. Cameras became housed in military planes, attached to weapon mounts and outright shaped like guns.21 Film and photography equipment came finished in army green or navy blue. Projectors, like movie cameras, became standard operating equipment, encouraging a series of innovations involving materials that were lighter in weight, more durable, and resistant to environmental factors (hot, cold, wet, dry) that caused corrosion, mold, or inoperable parts. New protective cases helped to preserve this equipment as it was transported across all manner of terrain. Simplified control knobs and inner mechanisms expedited operation and repairs.22 Camera and projector innovations also responded to the needs generated by swiftly expanding aerospace and munitions fields, growth areas that demanded specialized recording and display equipment. During the 1930s, film recording and analysis had become important tools of an ascendant industrial research and development culture. This led to faster shutter speeds, precise electronic flashes, increasingly sensitive film emulsions, and more powerful lenses that ushered in military and industrial applications of high-speed photography to machine analysis, ordinance testing, aerial surveillance, reconnaissance, and flight and instrumentation assessment, to name but

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a few. Film technologies served in the design of new information environments, comprised of film projection, three-dimensional terrain models, epidiascopes (opaque projectors), and other devices aimed at new modes of visualizing data and strategic analysis in multiple dimensions using multimedia displays.23 Celluloid and projectors became experiments within new conceptualizations of information storage, retrieval, display, and analysis. Vannevar Bush’s much-heralded Memex, essential to what became the computer, included film projections that created flexible data interfaces within nonlinear information environments.24 Film camera, stock, and projector together evinced distinct and multiple technical capacities—to record, store, access, project, display, and be moved from place to place—making film technologies uniquely useful to the military. This utility extended the role of film to research and development and information processing, forging new models to create and execute strategy, all of which continued to grow throughout the postwar period with strong military support. Many of these aspects of film technologies and their utility (and transformation) by the military are readily evident in the pages of the Journal of the Society for Motion Picture Engineers.25 During the war, SMPE meetings regularly hosted participants active in the military who reported about military film use. Presentations also featured information on film use by other national militaries.26 Before and throughout the war, American captains, lieutenants, majors, and corporals alike presented to the SMPE on military film activities.27 Topics covered specific aspects of camera or projector operation or film processing; the varied uses and functional elements of the military’s film program, including the challenges of combat camera work; the daunting logistics of global film distribution; and the enormous task of cataloging the spiraling number of films. Reports on special uses for film equipment such as flight training and data analysis also appeared on journal pages. During the war years, multiple issues of the journal were devoted solely to military practices, wherein all manner of military activity and needs were discussed.28 Early-on in the conflict, a joint military-SMPE committee formed, along with members of the American Standards Association, to advise on and establish technical standards for military equipment for all relevant arms of service. Members of the Signal Corps, the Army, and the Navy participated. First reporting in 1944, this committee focused on 16 mm rather than the film industry standard 35 mm film format. The smaller gauge appealed to the military precisely for its portability, adaptability, reduced cost, and capacity to serve multiple functions.29 Thus, war accelerated and amplified the relationship between the military and the technical constituents

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of the broader film industry, not only Hollywood. By the war’s end, major and minor manufacturers of motion picture materials and equipment had turned over significant portions of their activities to serving military need. Alice Lovejoy has recently documented the sizable contracts for film stock between Eastman Kodak and various branches of the military.30 Bell and Howell, just one of the major manufacturers with military contracts, totaled over $100 million worth of military optical and camera equipment production during the war.31 This industrial flurry was foundationally linked to a scope and scale of film use that is difficult to fully chart. Consider an emblematic case: the Army Pictorial Service (APS) (figure 19). Operational from 1942 until 1970, the Army bought and occupied a major film studio and postproduction facility in Queens, New York, formerly owned by Paramount Pictures. Richard Koszarski has declared this studio the single busiest motion picture production center in the world during the war, with forty-five editing rooms and twenty-four screening rooms.32 The organization also had West Coast operations in Hollywood.33 Head of the APS during the war, Edward Munson claimed that as of 1946 its film library had over thirteen million feet of combat and production footage. The films made from this footage were in near-constant circulation to the eight million active soldiers enlisted overseas. Its V-mail units, charged with transforming letters written on paper into microfilm before delivery, had photographed more than a billion letters. The APS was not just a filmmaking operation. Its activities also encompassed an active research and development unit (Pictorial Engineering and Research Laboratory: PERL). “Pictorial engineers,” as they were called, completed over one thousand separate projects to design, test, and perfect film and photography equipment. Among the many activities, for instance, military specialists successfully intensified the brightness of portable projectors, which helped to improve the operation of daylight-cinema-viewing units. Some of PERL’s technical experiments were run out of Fort Monmouth in New Jersey.34 Other branches of the military carried out research as well. The Air Force was especially active in using film and photography as tools of measurement, required for many aspects of its operations, particularly flight paths and bombing dynamics. In these experiments, specialized cameras, high-speed flashes, and precise viewing devices became essential instruments for assessing and strengthening aerial weaponry.35 In addition to the APS, the American military maintained a sprawling film production system, with all major bases housing smaller and more basic filmmaking facilities.36 While the Army headquartered its postproduction

figure 19. An organizational chart for the Army Pictorial Service documents the diversified and sprawling functions of the organization. An accompanying article details a vast range of films that the organization made and distributed for civilian and military audience. It also oversaw other media-operations including those involving still photography and microfilm. See Edward L. Munson, “The Army Pictorial Service” Business Screen 7, no. 1 (1946): 32.

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and studio-based shooting in Queens, in truth, the need for military films was so great that facilities throughout the country were in near-constant use. Operating under its Bureau of Aeronautics, the Navy had its own Training Film and Motion Picture Branch with an estimated one thousand enlisted and civilian men and women working under its purview.37 The more specialized Photographic Science Laboratory Branch handled highly specific and often classified films, with hundreds of dedicated personnel.38 For more specialized and sensitive training needs, the Army Air Force built elaborate film processing facilities in order to maintain secrecy. Highly developed facilities supporting animation and special effects took root in Wright Field, Ohio (now called Wright-Patterson Air Force Base). Hundreds of personnel worked on films at this one facility alone.39 In addition, industrial filmmakers such as Burton Holmes, Jam Handy, Audio Productions, and many others reported hundreds of titles made on behalf of military and war manufacturers. Because such companies observed strict controls over film stock issued by the War Production Board, only military films and those subjects that made a “useful contribution to the war effort” were permissible. For instance, films that instructed about war products, as well as worker-recruitment films for strategic war plants, were numerous. These industrial filmmakers complained bitterly about the ways that their film use was restricted while Hollywood retained advantageous access to the industry’s raw materials.40 Clearly, by World War II, film technologies had become institutional necessities for the American military. While the expanse and depth of film use during the war was unquestionably unprecedented, earlier examples can be identified. During World War I, figures such as Frank Gilbreth and John Randolph Bray made military training films to assist enlisted men in mastering map reading, rifle operation, and battlefield survival.41 Gilbreth, along with his wife, Lillian, was a well-known industrial efficiency expert and advocate of time-motion studies that employed film in the task of analyzing and improving human movements in the age of scientific management.42 So eager was Gilbreth to market his business solutions and apply them to military need that in addition to negotiating with the American military, he also traveled to Germany in an effort to sell his techniques to the Kaiser.43 Reports suggest that films were ultimately of minor significance as regards training, research, and intraorganizational communication during World War I, though their role as propaganda had plainly been established. One source indicated that World War I entailed a total output of up to one hundred reels of training films.44 During World War I, films were occasionally shown as entertainment in training camp

figure 20. Film was for decades promulgated as an efficient, effective, and multisensory tool for teaching, but one element in an expansive multimedia training program. This manual outlines the use of films, film strips, charts, pictures, models, actual equipment and sound recordings to assist in training. Film was part of a shift in military training toward highly technologized but also multisensory teaching techniques. Note here the dual emphasis on looking at a film strip but also listening from an unseen source. US Navy Training Aids Manual, 1943 (cover).

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theaters.45 Films and film stars were used to raise money for the war.46 Newsreels addressing the war were a regular feature of military and civilian filmgoing. Throughout the interwar period, various military branches gradually institutionalized film use. For instance, as early as 1922 the US Navy issued a sixty-three-page guide instructing sailors in all aspects of its film program, including procurement and projection, maintenance, and safety. Similar guides were issued in subsequent years (figure 20).47 Select Hollywood studios also made films for the military during the 1930s. Many other national militaries used film well before World War II.

World War II and the Portable Projector The extensive use of film technologies during World War II is partly explained by invoking the overwhelming scale, scope, and speed of mobilization. Prior to World War II, the US military numbered two hundred thousand. By war’s peak, this had mushroomed to eight million in the Army alone. Cinema was called upon to train a massive, highly diverse, and specialized force quickly and effectively. As a training tool, films were deemed an efficient way to optimize learning, shaping a vast, multimedia training and communications infrastructure. Over and over in military publications, films are cited as effective methods of standardizing lessons, simulating experiences, and helping soldiers to better retain information. Qualities specific to film such as orchestrated and illustrated movements at different scales and speeds, active juxtapositions (editing), and animations to illustrate things impossible to see with the naked eye all fed into the investment in film as a uniquely important training device. Film was also occasionally understood as a tool for adapting to multisensory learning techniques that directly engaged learners with coordinated images, sounds, and colors. Military trainers implemented projectors and films as partly, but not fully, automated pedagogical tools designed more to aid, amplify, and expedite learning rather than replace a teacher. Indeed, as training techniques evolved, they relied more and more on interactive use of film. For instance, a teacher might stop a film and conduct a discussion. Films themselves were sometimes structured as question-answer modules; whole scenes might be designed as problems to solve rather than movies to watch or information to be presented.48 Equally important was the vast number of skills and behavioral protocols addressed to frontline fighters, as well as to engineers, technicians, scientists, doctors, psychologists, teachers, ship builders, radar operators, and electricians.49 Beyond training, films were used to entertain, inform, update, recruit, document, chart and

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map, propagate, heal, report, minister spiritual aid, fund-raise, and distract. The territory of topics was vast. Films imparted battle strategies and tactics. They helped to analyze, maintain, and repair machinery. Movies helped to sexually educate, to expand perception, to improve abstract spatial reasoning, and to prepare frontline personnel for the trauma of battle (psychological prophylactic).50 In addition, thousands of soldiers contributed to image production, distribution, and projection during the war and after as part of their enlisted duties. Making and showing films was itself a mode of military work. To support this scope of activity, roughly two years after the US entry into the war, the Army alone had built a global film distribution system consisting of 250 film libraries.51 Available numbers for the organized and sometimes nightly shows performed at bases and camps vary widely. Scheduled performances are for practical reasons the easiest to report. By war’s end, official reports reveal up to three thousand screenings a day, with a nightly audience of one million by 1945, capturing but one aspect of the military’s fulsome film use.52 Given this wide use of film and the many genres and subgenres it spawned, numerous questions remain. We know that all soldiers regularly watched movies. My research shows they watched many kinds of movies. Viewing scenarios varied. Some were required or compulsory and others elective. Some were formal and scheduled; many others were ad hoc, improvisational, or impromptu. The question I would like to focus on here is this: how did all of these films get seen? Or, more precisely, how were they shown? During World War II, as a response to incalculable need and a deep belief in the polyvalent effectiveness of film technologies, the military built an unprecedented global viewing platform comprised largely, though not exclusively, of 16 mm projectors. This platform grew in tandem with—but quickly exceeded—the sizable chain of purpose-built military theaters that operated domestically using 35  mm equipment.53 Like cameras, portable projectors were institutionalized as standard operating procedure, making soldiers into film spectators, linking remote bases with warfront battlefields, and turning frontline encampments into ad hoc screening spaces.

Projectors as Standard Operating Equipment I now turn to describing the workaday portable projector designed by the military to service the bulk of this expansive new viewing platform. I will also tend to some of the more experimental viewing devices to make the case that this portrait of film technology indicates something of the elastic way that moving images were being imagined and realized, designed and

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utilized by the American military. During the war years, film equipment manufacturers dramatically expanded their manufacturing facilities and production, rising to meet military demand and use. By act of law, the War Production Board (WPB), a government agency, exercised control over all materials and manufacturing deemed essential to the war effort. Formed in 1939 and dissolved at war’s end, the WPB oversaw the conversion of civilian and commercial manufacturing to wartime needs. It also exerted control over allocating resources to support those same needs. The WPB rationed strategic commodities such as gasoline, metals, rubber, paper, and plastics. It also issued clear controls on motion picture equipment and film stock. Because of Hollywood’s special status, the board’s restrictions ultimately influenced filmmaking outside of Hollywood in a much more direct way than films made inside the studio system. In addition to restrictions on film stock, 16 mm portable film projectors were identified by the WPB as a priority.54 Like related fields such as electronics, the needs of the armed forces were required by law to be filled first. New projectors could only be supplied to civilian users if their essential role in the war could be established. Any exemptions to military priority had to be secured from the WPB, which also issued requests for materials beyond their immediate control. For instance, in March 1942, the WPB publicly requested that projectors in civilian possession be donated to the Army, Navy, and other government departments. This call for projectors was not insignificant, as some estimates suggest that thirty-five thousand projectors a year were being manufactured in 1939, 1940, and 1941, in the leadup to the war. Thus with the WPB’s call—supported by other reminders to properly maintain and operate the newly essential machines—making, responsibly tending to, and donating portable projectors became a patriotic duty.55 Parallel to this, equipment manufacturers proudly boasted of their service to the war effort in advertising and publicity, highlighting the extraordinary military value of their equipment.56 With the importance of portable projectors plainly enshrined in wartime policy and military procurement priorities, production levels ramped up. During the early war years, procuring 16 mm film projectors initially entailed simply accepting what American manufacturers could make, which amounted to “off-the-shelf” solutions. However, it quickly became clear that the military’s needs were too immense and specific to be fully satisfied by equipment initially designed for use in offices, homes, and churches. In late 1942, and under the umbrella of the SMPE, members of the military and American film equipment manufacturers began discussions of a design protocol detailing the specifics of a film projector to suit

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the bulk of the military’s evolving and expanding needs. The result of this discussion was the protocol assigned the designation: JAN P-49. The letters were an acronym for Joint Army Navy, and the P stood for protocol. The JAN, as the protocol was called, was as much an abstraction as a thing: a fifty-eight-page delineation of qualities and performance standards desired by the military for its projectors.57 As a complete projection system, the JAN operated independently from any particular space. It came with an amplifier and screen measuring in width from five and a half feet to seven feet in the standard 16 mm screen ratio of 1.33:1. Military exigency became a call-out to American industry: Make this for us and we will buy it. In practical terms, there was no single JAN and the protocol itself was not officially issued until 1944. Before the protocol, large and small American corporations supplied projectors nonetheless. After the protocol, design, manufacture, and procurement became oriented to its ideals. It was not until war’s end that an actual projector approximating the military parameters was successfully manufactured (figure 21). Nonetheless, the JAN protocol summarized what was deemed conceivable and needed by a consort of military and industry experts during and after the war. The projectors that were made in dialogue with members of the SMPE became the backbone of the military’s global film system. Examining the JAN protocol and the projectors that evolved from it supplies us with an answer to a reasonably important question: What did the American military want from a film projector? How did the military want films to appear?58 The JAN protocol represented an enduring idealization of the military’s film display and performance needs. It favored such qualities as ease of operation, maintenance and repair, amplified sound, continuous operation, durability, portability, and adaptability to varied spaces and environments.59 Programmability was, of course, presumed. It featured modestly sized collapsible screens that could be easily carried and then erected again and again. Like other industrialized military equipment such as tanks, guns, and Jeeps, the JAN was also meant above all to be reliable and rugged, with the design protocol stating that the projector should operate at full capacity even after being dropped from a height of eighteen inches ten times onto a concrete floor!60 A projector that “can take the beating” was also a regular refrain in civilian discourses about projectors during the war.61 The imperative to make the JAN easy to use in part responded to the need for untrained or quickly trained soldiers to work the machine, moving away from the highly specialized skills of commercial projection and toward a type of film performance that could be accomplished with minimal experience and relatively unskilled hands.

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figure 21. The JAN pictured here was used by the US Army Signal Corps and was camouflage green, clearly marking the projector as an integrated element of all Army equipment. (Photo by Haidee Wasson, JAN from the Herbert E. Farmer Motion Picture Technology Collection, Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, University of Southern California.)

The capacity of a soldier to easily move the projector was foundational to the JAN protocol. This was plainly enabled by the unit’s use of nonflammable film stock, which had long before the war eliminated the threat of fire and hence the need for fireproof booths that were previously required in portable projection scenarios. The call for lightness of weight is also made more meaningful when considering that the projectors made during the war often, somewhat surprisingly, weighed as much as seventy pounds. Portability—even in the context of a highly rationalized and militarized context—is clearly a relative concept. Anecdotally, it seems that while the projector’s handle suggested that a single human body might carry the device, soldiers frequently threaded a stick through its handle in order that two could share its load. The handle and the rugged case further demonstrate that the JAN was made to be moved, and frequently, by human and all other manner of transport: plane, ship, truck, and mule. The JAN

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protocol also stipulated high performance under heavy, near-constant use in all theaters of operation (arctic, tropical, desert)—a kind of all-weather, all-terrain device. It was designed to run all of the time, anywhere. Also interesting is that the persistent demand in prewar discourses calling for a film projector that could exert total control over film speed and allow for sustained still-image projection was absent from the JAN. This particular capacity was deemed too costly, largely in terms of the inevitable damage to film prints. The JAN became a trusty playback device, distinct from the other more specialized projectors designed for control of movement and sustained, focused analysis. Despite the military’s ambitious institutional vision of a global, rugged, effective, efficient viewing platform, evidence suggests that the portable projectors it used were dirty, heavy, and frequently broken. Like other military equipment, projectors were imbricated in a highly bureaucratic structure, replete with operation and repair manuals, forms for ordering parts, and procedures for use. An overstretched military fighting on multiple fronts hindered timely delivery of films and spare parts. While the JAN was conceived as a solution to the military’s needs, it is clear that the projectors made during the war years were far from the sleek, speedy abstraction machines often imagined by media theorists.62 Operational challenges persisted. For instance, film projectors work by throwing light from one point to another. Effectively containing and directing that light is one of the key qualities that ensure basic image legibility. Yet technical matters as seemingly simple as illumination varied greatly throughout the history of such devices. At peak operating performance, the JAN protocol called for machines that threw light at roughly 300 lumens, whereas most movie theaters today operate at 33,000 lumens, a significant and qualitative technical fact shaping brightness and legibility.63 In terms of size, the JAN threw images that were rarely larger than between seven and ten feet high. Reports on projectors in the field indicated that soldiers regularly complained that not only were the images too small, but its sounds were inaudible. By contemporary standards, the portable projectors supplied images that were small and dim and emitted sounds that were frequently distorted and faint. Reports also indicate that maintenance of the projectors was a major problem, as high use, rough conditions, and extreme climates plagued projector operation. Further impediments included a shortage of trained projectionists and repairmen. Despite operational realities, 16 mm projectors spread widely and rapidly throughout the military and enabled an expansive, perhaps imperfect, utility. Enlarging and sufficiently amplifying a sizable and sanctioned body of audiovisual content

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that could be played for audiences of many sizes, configurations, and purposes, these machines were, in short, deemed good enough.64 The noted technical improvements that resulted during the war, guided by field reports and the JAN protocols, brought increased weather resistance for outdoor screenings, greater ruggedness to enable more diverse transport, and improved sound and picture quality.65 Efforts to magnify image brightness and the projector’s throw of light (which determines image size) persisted throughout the war, as it was not uncommon to require images large enough for one thousand soldiers to see. Prewar image dimensions of five to twelve feet would prove illegible to many in any sizable viewing situation. Problems with sound clarity and amplification continued. The larger the audience the less audible the sound. Some reports indicate that by war’s end the use of stronger light sources and public address systems helped to placate audiences of thirty-five hundred and over. Screens tended toward matte surfaces for general audiences, which maximized angle of viewing but sacrificed the overall brightness offered by beaded screens.66 Hooded screens and rear-projection screens were also in regular use to facilitate screenings in full natural or artificial lighting for much smaller groups. Curiously, a projector that met all of the JAN protocol’s stipulations was never in use during the war. The first contract based on the actual protocol was issued to DeVry in 1946.67 The 16 mm projectors made during the war that preceded or aspired to JAN standards nonetheless became the backbone of the military’s film display system during and after the war. Portable projectors played films outdoors on airstrips; in remote tents, strategy rooms, soldiers’ barracks, submarines, hospitals, classrooms, and mess halls; and from the backs of Jeeps at bases and encampments large and small.68 By war’s end, 16 mm projectors had achieved a mighty footprint. While estimates vary, one report maintains that the Army (the single largest military branch) procured at least twenty-two thousand projectors by war’s end. These numbers reveal both a deep and voracious will to procure and a surprising capacity to supply.69 Other estimates pertaining to the number of projectors are much higher. For instance, quoting the War Production Board records, Gloria Waldron reported in 1949 that there was a total of eighteen thousand 16 mm sound projectors produced in 1941 alone, which is notable, as this dates before American entry into the war. But from 1942 to 1945, her report declares, eighty-five thousand projectors were produced for the Army, Navy, and Lend-Lease Use (for export) program, with an additional thirty thousand for “priority-civilian” use. These numbers continued to increase after the war ended, with fifty thousand projectors procured in 1946 and again in 1947.70 Industry magazines reported an annual total of

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ninety thousand silent and sound 16 mm projectors shipped from American manufacturers in 1947.71 By contrast, American movie theaters reached a peak in 1945, with 20,355 operating theaters.72 Thus at war’s end and in the years immediately following, portable projectors in all of their iterations resoundingly outnumbered military and civilian 35 mm movie theaters. The JAN protocol and the institutional imperatives it reflects normalized and standardized a projection ideal. The JAN P-49, discussed above, was the most basic form of military cinema: rugged, built like a tank, and stripped down in function to increase reliability. Yet many other projection devices were developed by the military during these years. Among them was a modified JAN that was not designed to facilitate conventional film projection that cast moving images from one side of the room to another. The JAN P-229 detailed a rear-projection protocol, issued one year after the paradigm-setting JAN P-49, placing the projector behind rather than in front of the screen. The JAN 229 was a console film projector, one that looked like a piece of furniture. It offered a different screening scenario and a unique mode of watching.73 Like the P-49, the P-229 was capable of continual operation to accommodate heavy use. It was fitted with a looping mechanism for situations in which it was desirable to play the same film repeatedly. The projector itself was entirely housed in a cabinet, with castors at its base to facilitate what was likely limited movement. The rear-projection setup optimized controlling the effects of environmental light typical of many everyday projection scenarios. As such, the projector was secured in a fixed relation to the screen’s rear, all of which was encased in furniture, creating a dark box that better contained projection light and kept ambient light out. From the front, the film console looked much like early radios and televisions. The screen measured twenty-nine by twenty-one inches, emitted rather than reflected light, and emulated the standard 16  mm ratio of 4:3. The console was also to be built with moveable panels and an adjustable projection mount in order to allow for ceiling projections, likely for soldiers lying on their back while recovering from battle wounds or psychological traumas.74 The console featured a push-button interface on the front that permitted a technician, teacher, lecturer, or therapist to control the film. One could pause to offer live interjections, facilitate a discussion, or simply end a film at any point. Military teachers and trainers were expressly directed not to simply let films play. Instead they were encouraged to actively animate them, suspend the show, augment the images, edit them, turn the sound up and down, show only relevant parts or talk over segments.75 This helps explain why the console also contained a microphone jack. Film sound

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switched to microphone sound with the simple flip of a toggle. With an ever-present microphone, a presenter’s voice could be amplified during or independently of a film. Many such portable projection devices (including the JAN P-49) operated as stand-alone public address systems as well. In other words, portable film projectors were multiuse media machines amplifying and augmenting sounds and thus transforming how we hear as much as how we see. So, in a sense this projector was a piece of institutional furniture. It was not the suitcase model of the more prominent JAN. It moved, but with limited range. As a playback device, the JAN-P 229 facilitated endless loops; it could be used for everyday screenings or more event-oriented performances, but only with small audiences. It lent itself to casual illustrative application in classrooms and invited live interjections and accompaniments through its microphone toggle and accessible volume controls. The JAN-P 229 facilitated an “ambient cinema,” akin to what Anna McCarthy has called “ambient television”; that is, it was a cinema machine that could always be on and in different spaces, as much like living wallpaper as a special focal point.76 Its principles of easy operation also permitted a highly scheduled and intentionally performative use. Previously sold as a retail, public information, and music machine before the war, the device became an “audiovisual medium for training,” as advertised by Mills Industries in the pages of Business Screen during the war. Ads conflated learning and selling, extolling the virtues of the “training and merchandising” device. The company claimed their product could quickly tell stories and impart messages that would be “more impressive and more effectively received by a responsive audience—whether training or selling.”77 In fact, Mills claimed that its self-contained, all-in-one units eliminated the nuisance of projection and speaker setups, lens adjustment, and the problem of matching screen to film frame. Thus, the machine was advertised as a theater-ina-console, one that automated all essential aspects of running a film show, even the labor of operating ostensibly simple, portable devices. During the war years, this device likely served several military purposes. Mills Panoram claimed that its consoles were used by the Army and Navy as well as by industry and retail outlets, such as Western Electric, General Electric, American Hospital Association, International Harvester, General Motors, Lockheed Aviation Corporation, Wright Aeronautical Corporation, Sears Roebuck, and Marshal Field Department Stores.78 Andrea Kelley confirms that during this period such rear-projection machines supported many functions. They entertained soldiers and civilians, primarily as a “video juke box.” These devices were frequently placed in leisure and

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transport zones in major American cities, as well as in bars, cafés, and restaurants.79 Before the war, the Empire Marketing Board (UK) placed similar devices in train stations to show their films. And in public venues such as fairs, expositions, and retail outlets, these machines displayed product films and advertisements.80 In the context of American military operations, they were deployed on airfields for pilot training and in officers’ recreation rooms. They were also part of the military’s general training programs, compensating when needed for the shortfalls of the more common JAN-P-49. Largely, the 229 was designed as a form of daylight cinema, in part to respond to the need for displaying images in venues that could not be sufficiently darkened, or where darkness was a kind of liability to full effectiveness. Some military studies showed that standard projection scenarios that logically maximized darkness and normalized seated audiences led to soldiers falling asleep or becoming drowsy during film screenings when projection was designed to do precisely the opposite: make the learner more alert. Moreover, the disjuncture between the educational imperative to write things down (requiring light) and the need to see what’s on the screen clearly (requiring dark) persisted. Military officials were determined to make cinema an effective teaching tool. So, in addition to studies of pedagogy (how soldiers learned), using film for teaching purposes also involved studies of some basic aspects of the technologized environment. For instance, exploring the limits of legibility and the need for maximum attention, they asked: How bright did the image need to be? Or, how dim could movies become before they were illegible? Conversely, how bright or dark the room? Results indicated a half-bright room was deemed the best balance, with frequent instructor intervention also recommended.81 Military officials quickly observed that projected images did not automatically capture attention or ensure learning. While films may have partially automated a lesson, they were not mistaken for automatic learning. Still another rear-projection device that was developed after the war with research support from the Air Force resembled more what we now think of as a microfilm reader using 35 mm film.82 Choosing film to record equipment operation, exercise surveillance, or other tactical applications resulted in millions of feet of moving images reconceived more as reels of data than as raw film footage per se. Such data required a particular mode of viewing: to watch film images that were recorded continuously but that only yielded relevant information periodically, or perhaps rarely. Watching necessarily became something that resembled both the observation of a steady, speedy blur paired with a selective, sustained focus. This viewing device offered full control over film speed, allowing an analyst

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to efficiently transform continuous images into usable data by searching through what could amount to thousands of feet of irrelevant information and then spend focused time on the single frame that held significant data.83 Speed changed by way of a foot pedal, like on a sewing machine or an automobile, allowing data acceleration or deceleration as required. A viewer-analyst searched recordings of airplane instrumentation, atrocities from above or on the ground, aerial dogfights, under-sea mapping, and all manner of munitions tests. Surveillance films likely figured as well. Heat-absorbing glass, mirrors, smaller image size, and the close proximity of projector and viewer to screen maximized legibility and required less powerful lamps. It was the smaller lamps and close proximity that actually allowed for the close sustained analysis of single frames. Intense bulb heat, which regularly damaged film prints—especially those slowed down for closer viewing—had long plagued the enduring impulse to control the speed and achieve the stasis of projected moving images. Like similar viewing machines that preceded and also followed (microfilm readers and film editing tables such as the industry-standard Steenbeck), the film devices innovated by the military rendered image movement and film watching more controllable and, indeed, answerable to the long-standing efforts to exercise command over moving images in a rather literal sense. This technical ability transformed the ways in which viewer-analysts could examine those images, thus allowing the transition of images into data. Before moving on, two other projection devices developed during World War II are worth mentioning: one that contributed to a widely influential form of popular, commercial cinema in the postwar years, and another that remained highly specialized. The Waller Gunnery Trainer prepared pilots in the United States and in Great Britain. Experiments with this device began early in the war and grew directly out of industrial display imperatives to create wondrous all-encompassing environments developed for the New York World’s Fair beginning in 1939. Fred Waller, one of the Trainer’s lead inventors, presented the apparatus to the SMPE, with an article appearing in the organization’s journal in July 1946.84 Initially, Waller evinced a fascination less with size, immersion, or interactivity, and more with peripheral vision.85 In its prototyping phases, the Gunnery Trainer began as eleven linked 16 mm projectors. It eventually used five linked 35 mm projectors when put into action. The device also featured a curved screen mounted around centrally positioned trainees who would sit and respond to footage of enemy planes in flight.86 Sitting side by side behind gun-like mechanisms, two pilots directed electromagnetic beams at images of planes as they moved across the screen. This elaborate device

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assisted pilots with recognizing enemy planes and hitting them as they moved at varying speeds and at varying angles within and just beyond the trainee’s normal field of vision, exercising the eye to attain greater acuity at expanded angles and increased velocities. A direct strike registered sonically to the shooter through headphones. An instructor oversaw the sessions and sat perched above an electrical control panel that scored performances and registered pilot accuracy. The Gunnery Trainer was not just an oddball experiment, but a successful conditioning device in military terms. Seventy-five Waller training systems were built and remained in near-constant use—sometimes working around the clock during the war—by the US Army, the US Navy, and the British Airforce. Enthusiasts claimed that the apparatus trained more than a million pilots.87 Film technologies here engaged the seated body, employing recent innovations in electromagnetic sensing, individualized address, and filmed simulations of aerial attacks. Portable projectors were one piece of a complex, interactive training exercise, a war game evolving out of industrial display technologies and into a militarized, high-stakes learning machine. While the Waller Gunnery Trainer is the most well known of such experiments, others were also designed and implemented. Trainers and related film technologies were assimilated into the military’s own exhibition and public relations practices as these new technologies and techniques were put on civilian display to help with bond drives, industrial incentive events (to encourage innovation and productivity), and boosting civilian morale. Equipment manufacturers proudly participated in these public exhibitions and then announced their products as part of a technological advance guard across advertisements and public relations material. For instance, in 1945, the Navy orchestrated an exhibition featuring its combat equipment and training aids in Chicago that reportedly attracted four million visitors. Equipment from Ampro, Bell and Howell, DeVry Corporation, Mills Industries, Da-Lite, and Radiant Screen was on view. Many of the exhibits were devoted to the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, which featured visual training devices used in gunnery, navigation, and bombing exercises. On display and in full demonstration mode were gunnery training machines for air pilots, developed with the assistance of Jam Handy. Simpler and smaller than the Waller Gunnery Trainer discussed above, with this device enemy planes appeared on a screen positioned immediately in front of a simulated cockpit wherein a trainee would respond. Sitting in a nearby second cockpit, an instructor controlled the action of “the enemy plane as it is thrown on a motion picture screen.” Dubbed a Gunairinstructor, the device became part of a long exhibitory tradition of industrial fairs,

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here conjoined with military pageantry, celebrating the advanced place of moving-image technologies in war for a public eager to safely participate (figure 22).88 Small-film technologies became foundational to the Navy’s technological progress in several senses: (1) as an advanced training apparatus, (2) as a display apparatus for other and cognate systems, and (3) as a public relations and address system orchestrated to engender civilian morale and to enhance worker productivity on the home front.89 After the war, training machines like the Gunairinstructor and the more well-known Waller Gunnery Trainer continued to evolve. For instance, the latter of these became more conventionally theatrical in its construction and fully adopted 35 mm equipment. Targeted to a seated audience rather than a perched gunner, it was renamed “Cinerama,” as its designers sought further applications for it. In an effort to market the system, likely to the military, the device was sold at first as a kind of “experience machine,” an early virtual reality apparatus, with an uncanny power to stimulate feeling and simulate experience. This, promoters argued, would create truly democratic citizens, especially when displaying enormous images of battlefront scenes and enemy power. Publicity materials claimed that using the device to truly, deeply frighten Americans with the experience of autocratic and totalitarian domination would be good for soldiers, civilians, and democracy in general. It was celebrated as a large-screen, immersive fear machine. If operated regularly and widely, it could keep Americans prepared for the next affront to freedom and democracy, or so its promotional material predicted.90 By 1952 the system had morphed once again. This time it was situated inside sizable civilian movie theaters, with stereophonic sound, rich Technicolor processes, large audiences, and Hollywood showmanship. With a colossal New York debut, the new outsized cinema machine became a spectacular, popular, commercial entertainment with the premiere of the film This Is Cinerama (dir. Merrian C. Cooper). It was the largest and widest screen of its day and a grand display of postwar American technological might. More economical and technically simpler widescreen formats followed and were gradually adopted by the vast majority of American commercial theaters, forever changing the shape of the popular film screen.91 As discussed by Rebecca Prime, many of the Cinerama films continued a relationship with the military via personnel, consultants, shared equipment, and mutual interests in American world centrality. The United States Information Agency, established under the Eisenhower administration in 1953, sponsored Cinerama screenings internationally to win hearts and minds to the American way.92 The earlier strategy of invoking enemy fear had transformed into inspiring technological wonder.

figure 22. DeVry’s Panoramic Gunnery Trainer claimed to be an effective training tool for simulating aerial combat. Such innovations were proudly featured in advertising material and motion picture trade magazines. “Johnny Got His First Zero with Optical Bullets!” Business Screen 6, no. 5 (1945): 97.

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The place of the gunnery trainer in the history of large-screen theatrical cinema is clear and plain. Yet there are aspects of it that tend to be underexamined, for example, the role of moveable seating, electromagnetic beams, headphones, and control panels. These other technologies concretely situate film within a longer lineage of innovations not generally categorized as cinematic: weaponry; teaching machines; electroacoustics; lasers; personal listening devices; all manner of sensing machines, gaming systems, and flight simulators; as well as so-called immersive environments. One would be hard-pressed to call widescreen cinema portable. Yet what is useful here is the way in which small- and eventually large-screen technologies coexisted and evolved in relation to each other and to a whole array of other technologies. In other words, this is a case of busy cross-technological traffic. Take for example the fact that by 1953, Bell and Howell had announced a 16 mm widescreen projector with stereo sound that employed an anamorphic lens similar to a system known as Cinemascope, a theatrical widescreen system promoted by 20th Century Fox earlier that same year.93 Far from the realms of blockbuster entertainment, the use of this widescreen 16 mm projector was being actively proclaimed as an innovative and effective educational tool as early as 1955.94 To complement this projector, Radiant Manufacturing Corporation marketed a collapsible screen precisely to accommodate the wider 2.66:1 ratio of these films (figure 23). This small but widescreen format was sold to “institutions and industry,” and measured in width from eight to twelve feet across. The widescreen was not always a big screen. One last example of military innovation illustrates another way in which portable projectors were being adapted and adjusted to military experiment and need. Lesser known than the Waller Gunnery Trainer was a projectorbased training system developed specifically for the Navy’s aviation program. This apparatus relied on an unusual single projector and a curved 360-degree screen.95 It was engineered to project images that appeared as though they were being seen from a fully maneuvering aircraft and that could respond dynamically to individualized, interactive training scenarios. This prototype used a relatively stationary battleship at sea as its primary prerecorded image. Participant-trainees were supposed to be able to feel as though they were wandering “all around the horizon,” emulating the view from an in-flight cockpit. A technically static image as recorded, it was made to appear larger and smaller, further and closer, level and at-odds with the horizon. This transformation was realized by the projector, rather than a moving camera. To achieve this effect, a 16 mm projector ran film at variable speeds—and variable magnification. In addition, the unit sat on

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figure 23. Widescreens were not just big screens. Small-gauge film formats were also adapted to service the newly wide but not always large film screen. Wide Screens” [advertisement], Business Screen (July 1954): 59.

a rotating mount that could pivot on three planes. The device thus yielded images that turned on multiple axes, producing images that seemed to move around the seated observer. Aided by adjustable magnification, these images appeared to move toward and away from the pilot, creating the experience of moving closer and farther away from the ship. The simulator could re-create an altered angle of approach to the target. Researchers claimed that this device could essentially display an image that could rotate on its own axis. It used a combination of lenses, mirrors, and prisms that transformed a looped film of a target ship into a responsive flight simulation. The ship was a conventional aerial recording and not technically animated. But once projected, the ship’s appearance changed at the will of the projectionist: a player of images and trainer of perception. A skilled teacher-trainer created live and improvisational imagery by actively spinning knobs and moving levers. Here projector manipulation replaced effects that camera movement, an animator’s hand, or perhaps shadow puppetry might have otherwise achieved; far removed from a blunt playback device, it was a tactical enabler of performed content. Reports to the SMPE confirm

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that this experimental projector was built as a prototype, but I have not been able to find evidence of its use or effectiveness.96 Projectors were but one of cinema’s technical components that were transformed by the imperatives of war. Among the many others, earlier German inventions pertaining to magnetic tape were taken up internationally, changing the way that film sound was recorded, edited, and mixed. Devices that emerged, such as the portable magnetic Nagra recorder facilitated new film movements such as direct cinema, which allowed for on-thefly synchronized sound recording and other observational styles of cinema throughout the late 1950s and 1960s.97 Lightweight, portable film cameras became essential for television news. Insofar as film is an art constituted by innovations in chemistry, we can look to the many improvements to color film and film for low-lighting scenarios that developed after the war from discoveries made by chemical giants such as Dow, DuPont, and Agfa (whose parent company is the notorious German-based I.G. Farben). Each of these companies had deeply troubling relations to the development of particularly gruesome war weapons. Portable projectors are but one of the war’s enduring legacies in cinema. This discussion provides a glimpse of one organization—albeit a powerful and large one—that exercised an ambitious, diversified, and experimental campaign to put specific film technologies and techniques to work and to war. The result was a particular kind of useful cinema, a complex militarized cinema, one that was big and small, dim and bright, slow and fast, highly abstract and also didactic. Portable projectors provide one technical through line for tracing iterations of a highly instrumentalized family of technologies, one that significantly reworked the institutions of Hollywood and expanded the forms and functions of moving images well beyond it. The experimentation charted here largely predates the period in film history when “expanded cinema,” “structural film,” and other modes of formal experimentation coalesced into what we commonly think of as “experimental,” “avant-garde,” and “underground” cinema—a body of films and artistic movements congealing in the late 1950s and 1960s devoted to exploring formal principles and aesthetic experimentation free from the imperatives of big budgets and commercial logics.98 Yet, as Alice Lovejoy has persuasively demonstrated, the military should not be forgotten in histories of such experimentation.99 While the American military clearly had no direct relationship to the modernist avant-garde, we do see a devout commitment to technological innovation and experimentation in training and analysis that yielded new aesthetic forms. Moreover, both the American military and the later art-based experiments disarticulated

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Hollywood’s seemingly coherent apparatus, instead yielding immersive, abstract, and expanded viewing scenarios to support what was also ultimately a high degree of formal experimentation. To be sure, the military’s own brand of experimentation was operationalized less to free the cinema from its commercial and industrial roots than to fully imbricate film and its technologies within the workings of industry, state, and sometimes war.100 This form of experimentation worked in tandem with state and industry often to reaffirm American geopolitical power, which was not only about war but also about bureaucracy, organizational efficiency, and technological innovation. Fueled by the exigencies of World War II, and then the subsequent Cold War, the military used techniques of abstraction, distortion, immersion, dissonant sounds, looping, and direct address. And it showed Hollywood films. It also envisioned and built new kinds of spaces and hybrid technologies while normalizing extreme performance expectations for moving images and sounds. The military established protocols that influenced commercial, consumer, everyday, educational, politicized, and even subversive media for decades. For the military, these experiments supported vast and ostensibly pressing needs. In some instances, these new languages and techniques embodied attempts to heal soldiers and comfort distressed men and women, to teach about foreign cultures, and to rebuild communities.101 In other instances, these technologies and their uses were indissociable from other blunt instruments of military power, the tools of war, and the imperatives of an aspiring state. Lastly, it should be pointed out that the use of film technologies also enabled a degree of agility and flexibility in responding to institutional needs, helping to facilitate coordination across dispersed geographies and ideologies. The JAN protocol outlining the ideal portable projector was not singularly responsible for this proliferation of portable projectors. It does serve nevertheless as a kind of index to an institutional need and a performance standard, one that influenced military and civilian projectors for decades and fueled the transformation of film projection into an ordinary institutionalized fact. After the war, private and public film performance grew rapidly in homes, schools, factories, unions, clubs, governmental and policing organizations, and corporate offices. Industry literature reported that the same American equipment that helped win the war was supplied to British, French, Soviet, and other allies, leaving a significant postwar footprint.102 Portable film projection also became a standard element of new international organizations, including the United Nations and its suborganizations, such as UNESCO.103 After the war, portable projection replaced the movie theater as the most numerous and quotidian way by which one

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might encounter programmable moving images in the United States, and likely internationally. Its design principles echo clearly in immediate postwar industry predictions and plans for a consumer mass market in which sturdy and simple film projectors took their place alongside phonographs, radios, and televisions as part of a postwar media environment. Simplification of technical capacities, ease of use, and reliability of operation continued as dominant design principles throughout the 1950s and 1960.104 Size, illumination, and durability kept diversifying as needs and markets themselves opened up across a broad swath of consumers and constituencies. With further regard to film projection during the war specifically, new or adapted viewing devices and techniques emerged that included portable projectors and small consoles for stationary, standing individuals. Spectatorship thus involved training the sensorium through dynamic gunnery training techniques while adapting that same sensorium to the mundane work of data analysis. Embodied by design protocols like those of the JAN, the American military made projecting moving images ordinary, accessible, adaptable, and far nimbler than any civilian organization before it. Through the broader rubric of projection, this chapter has demonstrated that the American military from World War II onward institutionalized a highly complex relationship with cinema, considerably expanding our idea of what celluloid and its projection was for, and what it would become, during war and after it. This is not only a story about militarizing a singular apparatus but about instrumentalizing several, or perhaps many. Military engagement with portability and projectability assists us in thinking through the negotiated materialities of showing movies and the assertive transformation of cinema’s images and sounds. The size, brightness, speed, volume, and density of film performance and display were approached as a technological dynamic to be used within and across an expansive institution. Thinking about the whole of this institution thus entails movie theaters and narrative Hollywood films. It also requires tending to the half-bright, the grainy, the small, the still and the moving, the quiet and the loud, the immersive, the conventional and the experimental, the spectacular and the banal. In the case of the military we have to think about cinema as a technology of observation, storage, retrieval and display, and bureaucracy, as well as surveillance and waging war. Projectors enlarged, amplified, and made audible the images and sounds stored on celluloid in miniaturized, otherwise illegible form. The American military embraced these qualities of the technology and put them to work. The case of the American military complicates established ideas about the progressive nature of “experimentation” and invites us to explore the

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ways in which not just an expanded film industry but all manner of industry came to instrumentalize and experiment with film. Further examining this will require a family of other disciplinary knowledges and expertise: design, psychology, industry, military, physics, cartography and beyond.105 In simplest terms, assessing the military and its use of portable film projectors is a portal into a better understanding of the most basic ways in which films became visible to us. It reveals a fuller assemblage of minor and major film practices, film types, and languages as they developed across distinct technological, institutional, and disciplinary iterations. Moreover, it also demonstrates the ways that the American film industry’s technical apparatus—broadly defined—was like other American industries: quick to support, shape, and ultimately benefit from growing military might and its increasingly permanent place in the world. The military-industry link operated in the form of protocols, materials innovations, and widespread applications of cameras, projectors, and film stock that continued to develop long after.

4. Portable Projectors and the Electronic Age In the post-war era to come I envision a compact, inexpensive motion picture projector in practically every home, possibly furnished with the new car you will buy. Patrick Murphy, Commander, U.S. Coast Guard, “Like This,” Journal of the SMPE (February 1944)

Will the motion picture theater become an anachronism, to be replaced by television and 16mm non-theatrical film showings in churches, schools, unions, garages, and homes? Edgar Dale, “What’s Ahead for Hollywood?,” The News Letter (November 1945)

In 1954, Paul Wagner, president of the Film Council of America (FCA), boldly proclaimed: ”a new future is born.”1 Addressing a rising generation of technological enthusiasts, educators, and activists, Wagner extolled the virtues of the ascendant 16 mm film format, which he celebrated as a critical instrument for a new social, economic, and media-rich era. Previously a public relations officer for Bell and Howell, he had spent years advocating for film technologies. From his new pulpit at the helm of the nonprofit FCA, he continued to hone his craft, announcing that portable film machines were ushering in monumental shifts, analogous to such innovations as the printing press, photoengraving, radio, and television.2 Wagner was a particular kind of midcentury cinephile. He was, to be sure, an avowed devotee of cinema. However, he did not primarily pursue this devotion in the familiar methods often associated with the term cinephilia—through a fervent commitment to film theory and film criticism, or impassioned dedication to theatrical immersion in cinema’s darkened caves, or by viewing and reviewing the work of especially interesting directors or notably artful films. Rather, he zealously embraced small-film technologies, celebrating them as a unique, capacious, accessible, programmable, and adaptive media system. Neither constituted by big-box spectacles crafted for the many nor by artistry enjoyed only by a select few, Wagner’s cinema was a modern workaday 143

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medium. Mixed with his advocacy, he offered some basic observations. For instance, he noted that low-cost, user-friendly film technologies were transforming basic institutions and habits in essential ways: schools, churches, museums, public libraries, corporations, businesses, and government. He rightly noted that constituencies such as farmers, labor, and adult learners had already integrated movies into their activities. More and better projectors, proliferating film libraries and distributors, and an estimated twentyfive thousand new titles issued since war’s end would all continue to bolster this trend.3 Well aware of the ways in which World War II had stimulated many different applications of film, he espoused a commodity-friendly patriotism, listing the medium’s expanding capacities among other American triumphs like Coca Cola and college diplomas for all. It was an entirely new horizon of mediated possibility, fueled by a cocktail of facts mixed with a fervor for new technologies construed as magical, democratizing panaceas. Wagner’s organization, the FCA, sprouted out of wartime film activity orchestrated by the Office of War Information (OWI). From 1943 to 1945, and in addition to the extensive overseas military activity documented in the previous chapter, 16 mm networks were enlisted as essential tools on the home front, servicing a government tasked with mobilizing American civilians in the war effort. The OWI created a program in which films recommending civilian thrift and preparedness were circulated widely to schools, libraries, churches, community groups, and factories via the twenty-five thousand 16 mm projectors estimated to be in domestic operation.4 No small undertaking, the program is believed to have reached three hundred million viewers during its two years of full operation.5 With the war’s conclusion, the OWI was shuttered. The FCA stepped in to build upon the OWI’s efforts. Without wartime mandates and funding, private citizens and volunteers filled film council ranks. FCA tasks were varied, but above all, the council coordinated local community groups and advocated for the productive, local, and engaged use of film, broadly conceived. According to media scholar Charles Acland, the FCA’s goals were also weighted with the basic challenge of harnessing the explosive growth in a new and largely chaotic field of small-gauge film circulation and use. Mirroring the spread of portable projectors, the organization grew exponentially. By 1951, the FCA had more than 150 local operating chapters and an additional twelve hundred information centers servicing towns and cities throughout the country.6 Wagner’s unbridled enthusiasm for the role of 16  mm in everyday American life was not a radical rejection of theatrical cinema or the business of film. Like the council movement itself, his ardor was fueled by the

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embrace of a new film format, one that was more apposite than opposite to Hollywood. Small-gauge cinema was crafted as dynamic, timely, and responsive to human activity and busy, scheduled lives. It was an invitation to all Americans: Embrace technological modes of living; you will become more efficient, connected, and modern. In this sense, the FCA conceptualized 16 mm more as a complex technological hub within a broader media ecology, one that operated on multiple scales and served the necessary role of connecting people to each other and the world through moving images and sounds. By midcentury these small-film technologies were only partly about filmmaking per se; they were also about enabling a new kind of film viewing, one that was understood as integral to communal experiences, shared information, and tapping into a newly vibrant mediated way of being. As such, they seeded new modes of individual and group engagement. Alongside the grassroots and local ethos that animated undertakings such as the film council, the postwar proliferation of these devices also sparked new techniques of authority and efficiency within governments, military, and industry. These cinema machines also licensed novel forms of knowledge in the realms of science, research, and development. Their placement in many spheres and integration into regular routines is undeniable. Charles Acland has argued that emergent educational film technologies were conceptualized as a whole new mode of integrated, technological learning and were inextricably linked to the midcentury sensibilities captured by Marshall McLuhan’s idea of a “global village,” a world made both smaller and bigger simultaneously through expansive electronic systems and orbiting satellites.7 Acland focuses specifically on the rise of teaching technologies and multimedia pedagogies, along with the network of class-based expertise that promoted them. Building on this, what follows extends Acland’s insights and inserts portable projectors into a whole, ascendant electronic world. This chapter documents the rapid proliferation and spread of film projectors throughout the 1950s. Far from the ostensibly mind-numbing conformities often associated with so-called mass media, these machines were often framed as emblems of active media engagement. Widespread discourses tirelessly associated these devices with community discussion, debate, cultural programming, individual agency, and connectivity. Adding to the developments mapped previously, this chapter traces the postwar euphoria surrounding portable film projectors. It concentrates on how the film technology industry framed the projectors’ form and function, while also tending to cultural and institutional discourses and activities. This chapter also documents the seemingly instantaneous manufacture of these devices, which spilled from factories at dizzying speed. Due to the war

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mobilization and amped-up production capacity that persisted long after, by decade’s end, portable projectors did not simply outpace their theatrical counterparts; they dramatically, overwhelmingly outnumbered them. The postwar portable projector sits somewhere between what the contemporaneous media theorist Marshall McLuhan termed the “hot” medium of theatrical cinema and the “cool” medium of television. Roughly analogous to what today we might call hi-resolution (hot) and low-resolution (cool), McLuhan’s categories are usefully understood as an effort to identify not a sharp dichotomy as much as a spectrum of midcentury media experience.8 Along this spectrum, small projectors occupied a middle ground, brokering in discourses that offered up new intensities and specific ontologies that evolved alongside the other big and small screens that characterize the period, from the gargantuan, immersive cinema screen to the small, living room television set often camouflaged as domestic furniture. With millions of projectors in production and use, many variations on portability and projection arose; specific design tendencies will thus be identified and addressed. In particular, three types of portable projectors that appeared postwar are examined, each with its own technological capacities and functions: the mass market projector, the analytic projector, and the magnetic-recording projector. These subcategories are offered to lend a degree of contour to the otherwise vast sea of film machines and the many applications they engendered, as well as the modes of watching and use they invited. Finally, this chapter will consider some of the key social and institutional contexts within which these design capacities flourished, interfacing with organizations in cultural, educational, civic, and business spheres. Above all, what follows provides a view to the conditions in which film projection became a normalized, recognized expression of an electronic, mediated ecosystem at midcentury.

Portable Projection Everywhere! After the war, portable projectors spread assertively in a context wherein many media proclaimed new, sometimes exhilarating experiences. Postwar consumerism also aided the proliferation of such devices in the home and across American institutions. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, what Lizabeth Cohen has called the “consumer’s republic” took clear shape, making mass consumption the central engine driving prosperity as well as related social and political ambitions “for a more equal, free and democratic nation.”9 Buying things became far more than just self-fulfillment or mere acquisition; it expedited a specifically American

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worldview. Consumerism amounted to participation in the fight against communism, the defiant exercise of free will and choice, and a patriotic commitment to home and family. Television looms large in our understanding of this new postwar republic, and for good reason. Its assent was certain and its integration into American homes—a primary unit of American cultural and economic life—is clear. Americans eagerly made room for TV as a piece of furniture and a purveyor of programming largely funded by private industry that ultimately thrived on addressing viewers as consumers. Building on patterns established by radio, television constituted a new set of audiovisually mediated relations between home and the world beyond. It was more than simply a box in the living room, an automated shop window, or even an entertainment portal. Lynn Spigel and others have demonstrated that television became fundamental to basic discussions about media and everyday life.10 Where should the box go? Who would operate it? To whom should its content appeal? When? What sounds did electronic images make? And, conversely: What images did electronic sounds yield? Broadcast television answered some of these questions by offering up distinct programming genres scheduled to mirror the arc of an ostensibly typical day and idealized family rhythms. The American networks navigated enduring assumptions about gendered spaces and quotidian activities like housework, resulting in enduring televisual conventions. For instance, daytime programming prioritized ample sound cues and dialogue with frequent repetition bakedin. Such techniques allowed busy and presumably working homemakers to continue their chores as they moved about the house, perhaps losing a line of sight but remaining sonically tuned in. Riding advertising’s wave, television’s dispersed electronic ontologies linked the imagined family living room to locations far away, connecting private to public and also commercial spheres. Television was a whole new way of living in the world, reorienting domestic life and its spaces. It invited viewers to live with and alongside an ever-accumulating number of events that appeared in a box but were in a sense always happening. Those little boxes also reframed public spaces, appearing in bars and pubs and eventually waiting rooms, laundromats, and transport hubs.11 While television is plainly paramount to understanding midcentury American culture, so too are other technologies that were remaking what we might call the aesthetics, ontologies, and intensities of mediated living. Take for example home audio, which, under the rubric of high fidelity (hi-fi) phonographs, was transforming music listening. Distinct from but parallel to the rise of television, the hi-fi innovation, as Keir Keightley has

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demonstrated, employed discourses that appealed to specifically masculinized ideals of connoisseurship, buttressed by claims to sonic immersion, audio fidelity (faithful reproduction of live musical performance), and a resulting imaginary transportation away from the mundane and understimulating.12 This aestheticized escape was also unapologetically fashioned as a retreat from shared domestic family spaces, unlike the idealized “family circle” of television, which was often sold as bringing families closer together. Hi-fi units were also commonly characterized as properly native to masculine spaces, like the den or basement tiki bar. A connoisseur’s instrument rather than a push-button convenience, the hi-fi continued traditions of what Keightley has aligned with a masculine strain of “home hobbyism.”13 This was a typically masculine domain of tinkering and tools easily distinguished from ostensibly automatic convenience machines, which were frequently marketed as easing the load of what was crafted as women’s work.14 It should be noted that hi-fi units do not stand in for all home audio equipment, but they do tell us about a differentiated field of media technologies. Using the case of hi-fi, we can see that some home media technologies were designed and marketed to be more prestigious and aesthetically evolved, while others were more affordable, accessible, and easier to use. Historically constructed gender norms weighed heavily. The more prized masculine devices were presented as sophisticated and distinguished, while the pedestrian gadgets were associated with appeals to feminized push-button convenience and simplicity. Important here is that despite their differences, discourses of home television and the home hi-fi both frequently offered new electronic experiences and heightened cultural engagement. Both found a space within the highly coveted domestic realm, crafting everyday living as irrefutably mediated by multiple aesthetic intensities and experiences.

From Big to Small Screen Prominent tendencies in movie theaters and commercial cinema discourse echoed those of other media technologies as purveyors of new experiences, some with especially heightened intensities not entirely unlike the home hi-fi. Though Hollywood box office was in decline, the postwar period is also commonly understood as one in which cinema technologies grew in epic proportions: screens became bigger, sound became stereophonic, and rich, saturated color processes were refined. Production budgets also ballooned. Emblematic here was Cinerama, a unique, semicircular screen that more than doubled the width of the standard theatrical screen, requiring

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figure 24. Formats like Cinerama emphasized bodily thrills and gravity-defying experiences such as flying, floating, and falling. Filmed entertainment became an exhilarating mediated experience. Cinerama publicity pamphlet, 1952: 19. Author’s collection.

not one but three 35  mm projectors side-by-each in simultaneous, synchronized operation. Cinerama promised a thrilling, embodied immersion in gigantic moving images with unparalleled high-fidelity sound. This new spectacular mode vowed an escape from mundane realities through cutting-edge technologies of audiovisual enormity that offered to transport an audience member to someplace—anyplace—better than wherever they normally were. Extreme and exhilarating physical sensations, such as riding a roller coaster, flying a plane, skiing down a hill, or levitating above your theater seat, became prominent tropes in marketing campaigns, film posters, and popular press coverage of the new format (figure 24). Such scenes also featured regularly in Cinerama films. The promise of this event-based and visceral form of entertainment reclaimed theaters as destinations for unique, ecstatic adventures. Other somewhat more modest widescreen formats arrived soon after Cinerama’s 1952 debut (Vitascope, Vistavision, Cinemascope, Todd-A-O), buttressing the ideal of audiovisual grandeur and casting shadows over the smaller low-res electronic screens and audio systems that were fast multiplying.15 Historians of large, widescreen formats have argued that these were one of the ways in which the

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American film industry sought to recover its market share and declare its superiority to television, which many blamed for declining box office throughout the decade.16 Trends in large-format film (e.g., 70  mm film stock), bigger, wider screens, and stereophonic sound technologies introduced a clear contrast to the small, low-resolution images of television (and other movie theaters that had not yet converted), offering enveloping experiences of technological rapture. Efforts to distinguish theatrical technologies echoed the ways hi-fi was elevated above radio and less expensive phonographic devices.17 It was precisely this spectrum of aesthetic intensities subtending midcentury media that led McLuhan to propose his well-known categories of “hot” and “cool” media. The former was rich, vivid, and dense in color and sound; the latter was low-res, comparably dim, and reliant on thin, single-channel audio. If Cinerama would be considered a hot medium for its aesthetic depth and sonic rapture, television, with its fuzzy, black-and-white, small aesthetics, was notably cool. What is crucial here is that sonic and audile media with varied intensities were plainly transforming everyday life. These intensities often came packaged together with value-hierarchies of class, gender, race, and ethnicity. Cinerama, for instance, featured bathing suit–clad women on water skis; whereas men piloted military planes.18 It parlayed orchestral scores and tasteful tourist’s vistas that relied on highly Orientalized views of foreign locales. In the case of Cinerama, this gaze often even required the support of the American military and its airplanes to acquire its declarative aerial views.19 The big hot screen, in other words, was also an instrument of the long Cold War. Cinema’s big screens have received increasing attention in recent years. Yet we know little about cinema’s comparably cool film screens, which were sprouting up by the millions. With their relatively low cost, low-res, low-fi, small size, and clickety clack, they provide a striking alternative to the technological enormity and glitzy polish of Hollywood’s widescreen offerings. Furthermore, the capacity to program a portable projector, along with the multiplying numbers and types of films available, added to its stark contrast with Hollywood’s increasing focus on big-budget, hi-tech film shows.20 One was corporate, centralized, and predicated on formal rituals and a concentration of technological power. The other was designed to be user driven, dispersed, and informal, as well as widely accessible and highly adaptable. These small technologies spread with unequalled scale, towering in number over the specialized Cinerama installations and other theatrical screens. Portable devices rejected discourses of sensation, bodily thrills, and technological rapture. Rather, they espoused qualities that differentiated them

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from both television’s ambient daily rhythms and cinema’s extraordinary show. To be sure, some projectors were plainly chained to the gendered discourses of the home. They were marketed as simple to use and automatic and predominantly associated with “women’s work.”21 Other devices promised untold efficiencies in the workplace, bolstering the efforts of male executive and salesman alike. The voices advocating and weighing in on these small machines were multiple, and thus many visions emerged, spanning the domestic, public and private spheres. There was no single portable film machine. Yet, in the wake of World War II, projectors were frequently associated with American triumph and free enterprise, ingenuity, and the democratization of its technological prowess. Further buttressed by the enduring characterization of portable devices as lightweight, easy-to-use, adaptable machines, these qualities collectively shaped a decades-long conception of projectors in everyday and institutional life at the moment of their most remarkable proliferation.

Portability by the Numbers A largely unsupported assumption in film history holds that surplus military film equipment provided the seedbed for the postwar dissemination of civilian small-gauge film technologies and the subsequent diversification of film culture. Received histories emphasize the rise of an experimental art and amateur filmmaking scene (at least partly) on the wave of this alleged abundance of newly available devices.22 This story is often loosely supported with reference to important and influential film societies such as Cinema 16, based in New York City. Founded in 1947, the organization was heavily reliant on the ascendant gauge for its polemical and progressive model for film programming, its support of filmmakers, its steady and sizable audiences, and the gradual growth of its national distribution network.23 Here, 16  mm’s importance is plain, enshrined not just in the operations of a proliferating body of film societies that implemented the film format, but in the very name of a flagship film institution. Cinema 16’s legacies notwithstanding, we have long known too little about how so many projectors claimed a presence in so many spheres. Casual gestures to military surplus simply do not suffice to explain the magnitude of portable film use in the postwar period. How did so many projectors end up in so many schools, hospitals, labs, military war rooms, and government and corporate offices, as well as galleries, underground clubs, and film societies? To be sure, it is true that the military de-accessioned all manner of supplies after the war, and often auctioned unneeded equipment: tent twill,

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medicine, electrical wire, and rubber hose. Film equipment in both 16 mm and 35 mm format was reportedly sold as well. Evidence suggests, however, that only a small number of the tens of thousands of machines purchased by the armed services during the war found their way to surplus markets. Reasons for this varied, with reports indicating that devices were “worn out” or “could not be fixed.”24 Most of these old military projectors did not meet the performance expectations embodied in the JAN-P 49 protocol directing military projector development, which only coalesced and became widely available in 1944.25 The bulk of projectors in action during the war were designed largely in a prewar era when projector use was conceived as relatively gentle and occasional, rather than muscular and constant. These aging machines were also harder to fix and had been deemed obsolete by latewar innovations. While it is likely true that some surplus equipment was made available and sold during the decades that followed, it is implausible that military surplus equipment was any kind of primary catalyst to widespread change. It is more likely that the discourses of military innovation and triumphalism, which pervaded postwar civilian discussions about projectors (as well as other many other technologies), maintained a lasting impression. Confirming the lasting influence of the design protocols established during the war, manufacturers of projectors continued to advertise their devices as military tested and military designed, associating postwar machines with wartime bravado and victory. Such discourses plainly shaped the speedy manufacture and marketing of projectors as the war ended and throughout the late 1940s, persisting into the 1950s. As late as 1955, Bell and Howell proudly named one of its units using the acronym JAN, which stood for Joint Army Navy Protocol, a shorthand for military standard-issue film projectors.26 In other words, ads following the war decorated civilian and newly consumer-grade machines with military prowess, usually by invoking their triumphal use during the war. More important than the lingering influence of military discursive and actual surplus, however, is the basic fact that American manufacturers had built up significant production capacity and continued to make a lot of projectors; people and institutions eagerly bought them. As with many industrial products, the war created an urgent need for innovation and the expansion of capacity. Projector manufacture was but one of the many examples of this, with production more than tripling by war’s end. Over ninety thousand 16  mm projectors (silent and sound) shipped from American plants in 1947, more than double the number of 16 mm cameras that shipped the same year (see table 1). This level of

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Table 1. 8 mm and 16 mm Cameras and Projectors Shipped.

Cameras 8 mm 16 mm Projectors 8 mm (silent) 8 mm (sound) 16 mm (silent) 16 mm (sound optical) 16 mm (sound, magnetic or combo) 16 mm (total)

Quantity Shipped, 1947

Quantity Shipped, 1954a

Quantity Shipped, 1963b

274,122 51,008

443,396 29,188

804,000 6,900

215,533 — 35,449 57,409 — 92,858

273,273 — 14,786 37,865 9,125 61,776

546,844 — 2,659 42,217 — 44,873

Sources: All data for 1947 and 1954 are from the “1954 Census Report on the United States Photographic Equipment and Supplies Industry,” Report from Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, cited in “Annual Statistical Report—The Photographic Industry in the United States,” 3rd ed. (1959). Augustus Wolfman, ed. 8–9. Reporting on 16 mm projectors was riddled with inaccuracies, many often fueled by a will either to see this new form as a threat or as the next new revolutionary thing. For instance, Boxoffice (the official publication of the National Theatre Owners association) reported that Kodak announced four million 16 mm projectors in use throughout the United States in 1952 (Boxoffice 62, no. 9 (December 27, 1952): 26. a In 1959, there were an estimated 596,500 16 mm projectors in use. Data for 16 mm projectors in use in 1959 from Flory and Hope, “Scope and Nature of Nontheaterical Films in the United States.” Journal of the SMPTE 68, no. 6 (June 1959): 388, making a ratio of 305 persons to every single projector. b Data for 1963 from Augustus Wolfman, ed., 1967 Annual Statistical Report: The Photographic Industry in the United States (New York: Photo Dealer Magazine, 1967) 20. In 1966, there were an estimated 934,000 16 mm projectors in use.

16  mm production remained fairly steady into the 1970s, persisting for three decades. The 8 mm gauge provides an example of even more astonishing growth, with two hundred thousand projectors shipping in 1947. The smaller projector entertained annual sales reaching seven hundred fifty thousand per year in the second half of the 1960s, a level that was sustained throughout most of the 1970s (figure 25). While these numbers do not compare with the many millions more television sets that reached a sizable majority of American homes by the end of the 1950s, they do force us to radically reframe how we understand “cinema” as an infrastructure, an apparatus, and a cultural activity. The steady growth of small projectors throughout midcentury requires us to resituate the status of the

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600,000 500,000 400,000 300,000 200,000 100,000 0 1947

1954 8 mm

16 mm Silent

1963 16 mm Sound

figure 25. Projectors shipped in the United States between 1947 and 1963. All data for 1947 and 1954 are from the “1954 Census Report on the United States Photographic Equipment and Supplies Industry,” Report from Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, cited in Augustus Wolfman, ed., 1959 Annual Statistical Report: The Photographic Industry in the United States 3rd ed. (New York: Photo Dealer Magazine, 1959), 8–9. Data for 1963 from Augustus Wolfman, ed., 1967 Annual Statistical Report: The Photographic Industry in the United States (New York: Photo Dealer Magazine, 1967), 20.

commercial movie theater with regard to the whole family of film technologies that constituted the media ecology of the postwar era. To be sure, the theater remained the de facto site of professional, technologically advanced, star-laden, aesthetically magisterial commercial cinema. Yet, there can be no doubt, the statistics on portable projection announce this small cinema as the most common, accessible, and majoritarian mode for film viewing. In the shadow of the growing small-projector infrastructure, movie theaters might easily be thought of already in the 1950s less as dominant than as residual cultural and technological forms.27 While still important and prominent, they were being resituated by a new, more numerous, and nimble network of small portable machines. Consider that while the number of movie theaters declined steadily from the late 1940s onward, the numbers of portable projectors increased remarkably. By 1969, 16 mm sound projectors numbered an estimated 1,026,000 in use, while operating commercial movie theaters had declined to 9,750, a ratio of roughly 105:1. If you factor in the 7,500,000 8  mm projectors estimated to be running, it makes

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Table 2. Portable Projectors in Use in 1969. Projectors

Quantity

8 mm (silent) 16 mm (sound) Total

7,500,000 1,026,000 8,526,000a

Sources: Data is cited as an estimate in Augustus Wolfman, 1970–71 Wolfman Report on the Photographic Industry (New York: Modern Photography, 1971), 62–63; originally published as an estimate in Thomas W. Hope, AV-USA 1969 (Rochester, NY: Hope Reports, 1970). a For context, there were also 9,750 movie theaters and 3,730 driveins that normally used 35 mm projectors.

for a ratio of roughly 875 portable projectors to every commercial movie theater. If you consider the well over 100,000 silent 16  mm functioning projectors, this ratio increases further still (table 2).28 Take note: one kind of cinema was in marked decline and the other in stark ascent. The two different growth models for film projection are inversely related: one corporate, high-tech, professional, and often grand and exclusive; the other small, mixed-use, low-tech, programmable, easy to use, and accessible. Ironically, the largest diminished in size while the smaller mushroomed. These two spheres of small portable machines and commercial movie theaters were largely but not entirely separate. Eric Hoyt shows that postwar developments weighing upon the relationship of Hollywood films to small-gauge networks unfolded parallel to similar debates pertinent to the question of licensing Hollywood titles to television; both new media forms and their institutions threatened inherited film industry business models.29 Studios deliberated on when one title might expend its value in one format (e.g., theatrical) but then be extended in another (e.g., 16 mm, 8 mm, or television). With the Paramount decree, which had ordered studios to divest themselves of their movie theaters still in recent memory, Hollywood’s various constituencies recognized that they could not control the existence or growth of these other distribution and performance platforms; they could only negotiate their relationship to them. Moreover, they exercised notably little power over the concurrent expansion of filmmaking entities that arose to specifically service the new small-gauge circuits with films made especially for them—artistic, political, pornographic, educational, business, industrial, religious, and community focused. Ultimately, Hollywood studios adopted different approaches to the perils and possibilities presented by the network of 16  mm projectors.

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Immediately after the war, some of the film prints Hollywood had donated to the military exclusively for overseas screenings were reportedly being used domestically for “jackrabbit,” or unlicensed, shows using 16 mm projectors.30 Studio lawyers, as well as the FBI, aggressively intervened. But tracking down wayward military donations was only an early chapter in this story. Eric Hoyt has shown that as the decade progressed and into the 1950s, companies like MGM were notably resistant to new distribution systems (16 mm and television) and declined to issue its films in those formats for years.31 In contrast, the so-called “little three” studios (Columbia, United Artists, Universal Studios), each without deep control of theaters, were far more enthusiastic about what the new format might hold for them. Columbia, for instance, issued dozens of titles on 16 mm by the end of the 1940s. Universal Studios actively explored issuing its films on 16 mm, opening a subsidiary—United World—to grow the 16 mm field and increase its share of it. Expressed as a percentage of total profit, the small-gauge circuit represented only a minor revenue stream. Yet that profit grew healthily and steadily after the war, aided by Universal-United World’s 1946 purchase of Bell and Howell’s FilmoSound Library, which held some six thousand titles.32 Whereas United World worked primarily by selling prints, a competing entity, Film, Inc., was preferred by other studios because it worked to more tightly control copies using a rental system.33 As a result, Universal and United World were regularly embroiled in controversies over unlicensed screenings and complaints from theater owners regarding competition for patrons throughout the 1940s.34 When film prints were sold rather than rented, they seemed to have circulated in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways, agitating those committed to maximizing the profits attached to prized Hollywood titles. Theater owners were generally skeptical about 16 mm-reduction prints of films that they felt rightly belonged solely under their umbrella. It is worth noting that some exhibitors did happily incorporate small projectors into their auditoria or lobby displays. Others used 16 mm projectors to fill dark hours with alternative programming.35

Selling 16 mm during the War and After While the spheres of theatrical and small-gauge film projection overlapped, the differences between them were far more pronounced. Indeed, the discourses and practices that shaped the cultural meanings and capacities of this explosive and aggressively expanding network of portable projectors

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grew despite the concerns of established film interests. Widespread discussions about these machines—what they would do, why they would matter, who would they serve—had begun well before the war. Yet, such questions took on more dramatic meaning and secured a tenacious hold during the war. Far removed from the battles over how to control wayward copies of melodrama and action movies, the military, in the full drama of world conflict, was demonstrating that far more was at stake than an evening’s amusement when it came to portable projection.36 Predictably, the military’s extensive utilization of film featured routinely in the discourses put forth by American equipment manufacturers on the home front, creating a widely available set of terms and images that portrayed projectors as essential, heroic machines. Much of this boosterism circulated widely during the war despite the fact that most Americans could not purchase 16  mm projectors: new devices had been deemed essential to the war effort and hence civilian use was restricted to “essential war activities.”37 Nevertheless, Greg Waller has shown that film technology producers consistently advertised 16  mm to American consumers precisely by celebrating their status as strategic war technologies, helping to brand both manufacturer and machine as patriotic, powerful, and necessary to American triumph.38 During the conflict, organizations such as DeVry, Bell and Howell, Radio Corporation of American (RCA), Ampro, and Victor Animatograph presented projectors in their advertising and public relations messaging as multipurpose and modern, deeply implicated in matters of pressing national concern. The military-industrial might of these machines was also mirrored in publicity materials that sometimes aligned dozens and dozens of identical projectors into ordered rows, calling forth the efficiency of a production line as well as the controlled rationality of a military parade (figure 26). Small-film projectors, so it was increasingly and widely claimed, were potent devices performing ordinary and extraordinary tasks with untold efficiency. They entertained, to be sure. But more so they enlisted, trained, strategized, fought, and triumphed. The most declarative of these discourses imbued projectors with “unmatched American military and industrial prowess” and “unchallengeable American might.”39 The small-film projector became a formidable machine. This gung ho approach to projectors appeared amply in publications such as Business Screen, Educational Screen, and Movie Makers (the largest publication for amateur film). It can also be found in equipment catalogs, sales pamphlets, trade fairs, and intra-industry communications. At war’s end, manufacturers of film equipment, members of the military, filmmakers,

figure 26. Postwar projector manufacturing increased exponentially. Such devices were bolstered by the industrial rhetorics of defiantly infinite supply, carried forth from familiar wartime refrains. Pictured here is a delivery to Los Angeles Schools of a shipment of Victor LiteWeight projectors. Victor Newsreel (May–June 1948): 1. (Victor Animatograph Records, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.)

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film producers, educationalists, and garden-variety media enthusiasts continued these claims. Joining advocates like the Film Council of America’s president Paul Wagner, they proclaimed a vital new era of film. Uniting these spheres, there appeared a new universal truth: film projectors and their portable screens helped win the war and deliver life-saving, enemydefeating moving pictures everywhere—grassy hillsides in Italy, muddy German fields, and steaming tropical jungles in the South Pacific (figure 27). With victory, these machines would continue to reign triumphant, imbuing civilian life with the very same capacities that had brought American success overseas: technological superiority, modernized learning, organizational efficiency. People would now be connected in peacetime through everyday projected images and sounds. At conflict’s end, celebrations of distant conquest metamorphosed into the promise of peaceful backyards, community halls, and shop floors back home. With the lifting of regulations limiting civilian projector use, the machines were newly available to consumer markets. Along the way, they acquired a kind of rhetorical exuberance, buttressed by promises to reshape not just how and what people watched but how they did just about everything else. Portability was now linked to what Waller has called an “open-ended promise—at once ideological, social, and pedagogical—of motion pictures.” Key here was that film technologies had been broadly and deeply reconfigured—that is, “set free from the constrained conditions of commercial cinema.”40 No longer simply an evening’s entertainment or matinee delight, these were multipurpose devices ready to serve an expanding and previously unforeseen set of functions. This sense of limitless capacity imbued the hardware with an exciting, nascent energy— the raw discursive power of pure technological potential. Crucially, it was not only in the pages of the trade magazines or the film technology industry that this enthusiasm could be found. It also appeared on the pages of daily newspapers and popular magazines, and among teachers, community leaders, and more specialized film enthusiasts—those with deep commitments to film as a specifically artistic or political medium. All manner of plans for 16  mm can be found bridging familiar and unfamiliar spheres, from beer gardens to executive meeting rooms, from commercial airlines to avant-gardist enclaves and art societies. Apparently, there was even a 16 mm drive-in.41 Like almost all other fields of American industry, film equipment production and consumption were reshaped by wartime innovations and production capacities. The protocols and manufacturing precedents that evolved during the war became powerful factors in the proliferation of projectors

figure 27. Advertisements consistently linked projectors and their brand names with the adaptability and international impact of the American military and its soldiers. This image of a man carrying a projector on his shoulder is a recurrent one in Victor advertising during the war, aligning the movie machine with the standard issue rifle, helmet, and backpack, which together made for a fierce, battle-ready fighter. The international footprint of this projector, effortlessly overcoming geography, punctuated the portable projector’s impact. “Through Algeria, Syria, Egypt and Italy” [Victor Animatograph advertisement], Moviemakers (July 1945): 242.

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after the war. Companies that had benefitted from military contracts and had built up production capacity continued to play a major role in the growing market. RCA, for example, a major force in the manufacture of media devices (phonographs, radios, televisions), had filled sizable projector contracts during the war and continued to be a major supplier of projectors thereafter. Bell and Howell and Eastman Kodak, both critical military contractors, continued to thrive in subsequent years in this and other fields.42 Yet the evolution of film projectors did not entail just one single direction of development. Engineers began designing—and companies marketing— a highly diversified series of projectors (silent and sound), with noted improvements to key operating features: increases in illumination, more control over image speed, and new sound functions, including in-projector audio recording, rerecording, and playback. Technological change facilitated new social and cultural dynamics of projection. For instance, the ability to increase the size of the projected images via new lenses and more powerful illumination led to enlarged audience size. Sound amplification and fidelity improved. Film sound could be recorded and rerecorded using magnetic technologies. This turned the portable projector into far more than a simple playback or performance device. In other words, projectors were designed as media-making machines. Parallel to these developments, sound filmmaking in 16 mm also became a feasible option for filmmakers, serving to stimulate the use of 16 mm cameras in the budding industrial and educational film and television industries, as well as in commercial newsreel companies.43 The pace of projecting images became a pressing concern as film technologies were increasingly specialized to service all manner of research. Sometimes called “analytic” or “time-motion machines,” these projectors accrued features throughout the postwar period. These embraced the capacity to project at varied speeds as well as in forward and reverse motion. Remote controls aided in operating the device as a sophisticated tool of analysis and presentation. During this same period, portability came to include permanent projection installations, sometimes in labs but also in sizable auditoria. Sixteen-millimeter projectors grew their own roots and became standard equipment in devoted audiovisual spaces rather than just portable and adaptable things to move in and out of rooms as needed. In other words, small film technologies became enduring elements of architectural and institutional infrastructure, especially for those institutions in which media of all varieties were becoming essential to inward- and outward-looking operations. In such instances, a projector’s capacity to be moved became less important than its ability to be safely installed, easily and reliably operated, and steadily supplied with content.

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A clear trend took hold that one commentator of the time called a “mass market projector,” an inexpensive, sturdy, simple, synch-sound instrument that could stand up to daily use and be operated by any untrained projectionist.44 To be sure, the mass market projector echoed many of the qualities of other media (photography phonography, and radio) that had already made the transition from technician’s delight to household convenience. The imperative toward reduced cost and simplicity—a pushbutton conduit to automatic, premade content and invisible as a machine per se—persisted. It was a common refrain in engineering and design discourse, embodying some of the principles in the military’s JAN protocol discussed in chapter 3 that called for a primary device devoted to easy, reliable playback. Distinct from the analytic and other specialized projectors that enabled a high degree of control over projected moving images (and sometimes eschewed sound), the so-called mass market projector was for the “casual” motion picture fan who was less invested in a display of machine savvy than in simply owning an efficient, self-operated movie machine. From invisible household appliance to high-tech research tool, the functions for this newly diversified family of devices was impressive: home entertainment, teaching and training, artistic experimentation, scientific instrument.

Projection as Everyday Convenience The idea of an affordable, consumer-grade projector for all had existed since film technologies were called as such. Yet the fact of its realization, firmly ensconced in a mature industry and a national network, indicates a momentous turning point in the projector’s evolution. Discourses of portability, long tethered to qualities such as ease of use, low cost, and lightness of weight, remained ever present. Yet, after the war, portability became fully viable in relation to postwar cultures of consumption and affluence and a general enthusiasm for gadgets and appliances. In 1947, Percival Case, representing a small technology manufacturer based near Chicago, addressed the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE). Case argued that it was time to take seriously the qualities required to make a projector for a truly mass market, which he defined as “those who are able, or who are prepared, to spend a minimum sum to possess the equipment necessary to the pursuit of their hobby.”45 For Case, these new hobbyists were not tinkerer-technicians. Quite the contrary, the “mass” user required no skill and did not seek in these machines any manner of work whatsoever. The mass market projector created a new sort of low-effort

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leisure: at will, push-button movie watching. As an apparatus that theoretically disappeared into the assemblage of other household appliances, this device required little effort, performed dutifully, and otherwise harmoniously blended in with domestic operations. According to Case, the machine unreeled a film, trouble-free and without interruption, from beginning to end.46 He wrote: “Such refinements as stop-on-film, reverse projection, and automatic rewind, though demanded by the advanced cinematographer, do not add to the fundamental subjective enjoyment of the casual motion picture fan, to a degree which justified their cost.”47 Case’s projector would provide a steady image without flicker and ideally operate nine feet from its screen and produce an image of eighteen inches for imagined audiences of six to eight viewers.48 It played at silent or sound speed, indicating a persistent belief that both would remain elements of this new ideal film-viewing scenario. Many other features were in essence stripped away from the mass market projector, distinguishing it from the “more professional and precise” instruments required elsewhere. Price and convenience drove its marketability. Building on such principles, advertising campaigns for major manufacturers who developed these devices extolled these and other familiar virtues including ease of use and lightness of weight. Some ads predictably claimed theater-like quality, much like the discourses that shaped home theater decades later.49 Others likened home film watching to experiences similar to those created by other domestic media. RCA, for instance, tethered its sound projector to the electronic ontologies frequently associated with television, offering a new mode of personal encounter with an electronic experience of the world. Here the projector was less about ecstatic travel—such as that offered by its big-screen Cinerama counterpart—and more like a personal, safe encounter with events and performances happening far away. The technology itself disappeared from advertising rhetoric, and small-film spectatorship was presented more as a direct interface with the world beyond. Notably reframing the event-based, big-screen model of the period, or the extreme portability of the military’s JAN—made to operate anywhere—portable projectors designed for the postwar mass market transformed the home-viewing scenario and aligned it with a domestic, suburban ideal. Privatized, safe, but also technologically advanced, these film projectors repeated long-standing promises made on behalf of other media technologies to allow the user to conveniently entertain the world made small and close expressly for them. RCA’s discourses of sound quality, framed as superior fidelity, resonate with those associated with the hi-fi discussed earlier (figure 28).

figure 28. RCA sold its portable projector by aligning it with its sound equipment, which included both consumer-grade devices but also theatrical sound systems. Here the ability of sound to enable virtual but individualized entertainment experiences is foregrounded, linking the portable film projector to both sound and televisual discourses from the period “As though singing to each one alone,” [RCA advertisement] Business Screen 11, no. 2 (1950): 35.

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Projection as Analysis While the easy, convenient, switch-on projector marked the evolution of projection into an “invisible” automatic playback machine, highly specialized projectors also appeared. These looked considerably different, seeking instead to be conspicuously visible machines that actively intervened in the appearance, meaning, and use of projected moving images. The application of film and film projectors in time-motion studies is well known, constituting some of the medium’s earliest developments and evolution.50 As portable projectors evolved, their applications for science and close analysis of images persisted. Indeed, there were many devices that allowed a high degree of control over the projected form, with a clear increase in their number during and after the war. The implementation of high-speed photography in the close study of fast-moving things required machines that afforded precise analysis. Outlining analytic scenarios typical of the time, one contemporaneous commentator identified three categories: “quantitative,” “graphical,” and “qualitative modes.”51 Quantitative analysis referred to the counting and measuring of recorded and visible phenomena. This might include tracking the number of built structures using aerial footage or recording the volume of pedestrian traffic. Graphical modes described the use of film to make otherwise unobservable phenomena visible to the eye through the many techniques of abstraction enabled by film. These could entail recording procedures such as microscopy, which allowed for images of very small things to be enlarged (e.g., a five-foot insect). Stroboscopy sped up the film recording process rendering phenomena that naturally occurred very fast visible to the slow human eye (e.g., a bullet could be slowed down to be observed when fired). Graphical modes might also involve projection practices wherein an image recorded at the normal frame rate might be projected at a different one: slowed, sped-up, or stopped entirely.52 Qualitative analysis constituted the most intricate of projector functions, the use of film projection to observe, map, and analyze the changing relationships of things in motion, including high-speed complex mechanisms, disintegrating fragments, and the expansion of mushroom clouds or flying debris. For instance, film became instrumental to atomic testing partly because it helped scientists to measure the relative movements of phenomena too deadly and destructive for humans to be near.53 Less apocalyptic research needs were also met by analytic projectors that boasted control panels, frame counters, forward and reverse motion, and reliable still-picture projection. By the mid1950s, many equipment manufacturers offered models that were intended

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figure 29. So-called analytic projectors were sold for highly specialized scenarios requiring close and multidirectional analysis. This included a range of scientific, military, medical, business, and even sports applications, as shown here. The ability to project in full daylight is a foregrounded feature. Rather than sound quality or audio fidelity, projectors such as this were often silent and used primarily for their ability to allow for repeat and on-demand stopping, starting, and reversing. Such devices became crucial for the close analysis of visual form, a foundational tool enabling the growth of film appreciation, formal film analysis, and the discipline of film studies. “Movies Come out of the Dark and onto your Desk” [Kodak advertisement] Educational Screen (May 1954): 179.

for research purposes. Predicated on close visual analysis, many eschewed sound. A 1969 industry report suggests that such “variable speed silent projectors” sold at a rate of roughly two thousand per year, approximately 2 percent of the market.54 These projectors were sold to an important and influential segment of users, but were by no means typical of portable devices per se. The best known of these is likely the Kodak Analyst (figure 29). Marketed from 1953 onward, it was a silent 16  mm projector devoted to detailed and sophisticated manipulation of the projected form, offering unparalleled control over film direction and speed. It had an instantaneous reverse function that enabled the smooth and easy reversal of

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prints; filters and fans that diminished heat in support of reliable stillimage projection that was less likely to damage film prints; and a rearprojection attachment that allowed for “desk-top” movie study.55 The remote control worked with a five-foot cord, giving the presenter/projectionist a degree of movement closer to and away from the machine. The Kodak Analyst was also later modified for even more precise control, allowing its user to precisely set frame speed. Scientists wanted to be able to run the film at any speed in any direction to maximize possibilities for analysis of data gleaned from recorded motion. Improved lenses ensured smooth and clear projection at slower speeds without the need to manually adjust focus. These invited sustained analysis of still images but required a compromise of low lighting and smaller image size. Some devices yielded images that were only several inches wide. Such multifunctionality punctuates the persistent fact that a projector’s performance vectors such as image size, brightness, and speed were intimately related. Lastly, some evidence indicates that researchers also worked to “game” commercial projectors such as the Analyst, jerry-rigging them to perform needed functions.56 Other examples of such specialized devices include the Perceptoscope, reported to the SMPTE in 1957. Building on military experiments, the Perceptoscope combined the ability to project slides, film strips, and films, as well as operate as a tachistoscope—a fast-moving slide projector for increasing the pace of learning through accelerated perception.57 The device also reportedly could project two films side by side simultaneously, or superimpose one atop the other. It ran at nineteen speeds and also operated by remote control.58 Bell and Howell also continued to design projectors for specialized military purposes throughout the decade. In addition to their Specialist, which worked similarly to Kodak’s Analyst model, the company presented the D-5 analytic or “assaying” projector, as they called it, in 1959. The D-5 arose from years of research into military projection needs and built upon the standard JAN-P 49 protocol discussed in the previous chapter.59 Developed primarily for the Air Force, the D-5 was a highly precise military machine, engineered to facilitate efficient and accurate analysis of aerial surveillance and combat, tactical, and test footage. It was an advanced timemotion device offering full single-frame analysis, single-frame advance or reverse, variable speed projection (from twelve to thirty-five frames per second), forward and reverse projection, and a frame counter. The machine also had what was called an “animation” device, which allowed any single frame to be rotated from 1 to 360 degrees, clockwise or counterclockwise. A remote control augmented the machine’s utility as a presentation tool. Key

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among the D-5’s innovations were low illumination and heat filters that enabled the full cessation of motion for close examination of a single frame.

Projection as Media- Making As early as 1947, avid users of portable film devices were talking about the implications of new magnetic sound recording and playback capabilities for projection. William Kruse, president of the then recently formed Allied Non-Theatrical Film Association, enthusiastically announced the merger of magnetic sound recording and film projection in the trade journal Educational Screen. Though the technology was still experimental, Kruse touted the benefits of this new device. It made possible the placement of sound alongside any image at any point in a film print by any projectionist. It also meant that sound could be erased or removed and endlessly rerecorded. That is, the sound track could be changed over and over again. Notably, recorded sound here became the purview of the projector and projectionist. The device for showing films was reconceptualized as a unique kind of device for making films.60 By the turn of the decade, several such projectors were readily available. For instance, in 1951, RCA promoted its “400” magnetic sound projector. Dubbed a “recorder-projector,” the device was sold to “nonprofessional” users.61 In 1952, Bell and Howell issued the Filmosound 202, billed as a portable unit with a projector, amplifier, and microphone in a single case. The 202 could show silent and sound films, the latter of which could be inscribed with optical or magnetic technologies. Featuring two side-by-side magnetic strip readers, the 202 enabled a projectionist to separately record music, dialogue, and effects.62 A month later Ampro announced its own “magnetic sound-on-film recorder-projector,” which offered a remote-control panel for both projection and recording from a distance. A degree of sound mixing was also possible with adjustable recording levels and fading functions.63 Concurrently, DeVry adapted its projector, which met the military’s standardized JAN protocol. This device was equipped with magnetic sound and could also show film produced with the older optical inscription system. Devry also promoted its projector as a stand-alone magnetic sound recorder—projection of images not required.64 In a nod to the very small, that same year the company Movie Mite announced an 8  mm projector that played and recorded magnetic sound film.65 Bell and Howell, Eastman Kodak, and many others began offering services that affixed magnetic strips to film prints without sound. This effectively transformed old and new silent movies into the raw materials for what could theoretically be a perpetual transformation process.

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The magnetic projector was a boon to producers of sound effects albums, who foresaw an expanded market for their products.66 The magnetic sound projector quickly made waves in the growing literature on audiovisual education. By 1953, widely circulated teaching guides incorporated suggestions for using magnetic film projectors as teaching tools. The devices were celebrated for affording teachers the ability to make their own sound tracks and custom-design a voiceover for each learning group. Targeted use of sound became a method by which to draw special and focused attention to the goal of a lesson and was likened to repeat showings, use of single frames, film reversal, and repetition (loops) as methods by which film projection could aid in learning.67 Magnetic projectors were marketed as useful tools for language instruction as well as for making multilingual versions of the same films. This latter function was particularly taken up in business and military circles. Magnetic sound projectors became a creative and practical tool that invited the transformation of images through the addition, subtraction, and layering of varied sounds. Neither blunt playback nor precise analysis tools, these machines were hybrid and dynamic sound devices that normalized the ongoing, varied application of prerecorded images in everyday and institutional media making and use.

Cultures of Small Cinema It is difficult to overestimate the ways in which portable projectors—largely in the format of 16 mm but also 8 mm—captured people’s imaginations and catalyzed a paradigmatically new way of thinking about what film could look like, why you would watch it, and what it was for. New local and national organizations formed, helping to coordinate resources and improve advocacy for making, watching, and using films. An extraordinary volume of publications arose, dedicating pages to providing opinions that weighed in on how and why to use portable projectors. Among them were mass-circulated magazines and newspapers, specialized journals, how-to books, and education manuals.68 Indeed, a national enthusiasm for audiovisual education was especially evident, fostered by the fervent proselytizing of educational technologists. Charles Acland has noted that the adoption of film and other media technologies in classrooms was inextricably tied to rapid social and technological change that could only be accommodated, it was often argued, by modernizing schools with more technology. In short, “preparation for an era of accelerating media change required accelerating media change.”69 Learning by media was widely deemed to be an essential adaptation to a new technological reality.

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Table 3. 16mm Projector Users in 1959 Sectors Education Religion Industry/business Medicine/health Civic/social welfare and recreation Total

Users 189,300 114,600 167,900 8,300 47,300 596,500

Source: Data for 16 mm projectors in use cited in Flory and Hope, “Scope and Nature of Nontheaterical Films in the United States,” Journal of the SMPTE, 68 no. 6 (June 1959): 388.

Ultimately, education and its expanding technologies were yet again connected to American security in the broadest sense by the National Defense Education Act of 1958. The legislation was an immediate response to the success of the Soviet space program and its launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. Among other things, the act secured and directed significant funding to purchase AV equipment and related materials for American schools, with concentrated support for language instruction, science education, and math training. The act’s passage was considered a boon to the educational AV industry. It is worth noting here that new pedagogies emerged alongside the increased use of media machines in the American classroom. These learning machines undergirded efforts to make teaching and learning more dynamic, multisensory, and student directed, displacing what were seen as older methods involving rote exercises and what we might call “singlechannel” classrooms.70 The growth in educational AV was frequently paired with irrational exuberance about small-gauge cinema, often linked less to what we conventionally think of as film culture—watching difficult, foreign, art, or political movies—and more plainly interwoven with enthusiasm for the new electronic age. By the end of the 1950s, education was the largest single sector using 16 mm projectors, although industry and business were a very close second, with churches and religious groups rounding out the top three (see table 3).71 Also important to note here is that while 16 mm most definitely became the primary format for institutional use, 8 mm also had a place as an institutional device, beyond its dominant use as a consumer gauge. In addition to millions of domestic units, there were approximately two hundred twelve thousand 8  mm projectors in use by American institutions in 1969. This number grew exponentially, reaching four hundred thirty-one thousand by 1974.72

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Bolstering the technological transformation happening in American classrooms, regular newspaper columns appeared discussing new equipment, titles, and services for educational and all other spheres.73 Futurist manifestos and everyday prognostications circulated widely, extolling the virtues of projectors imbued with seemingly limitless powers.74 Organizations emerged specifically to use and promote 16  mm, some of which reflected the educational developments referred to above: Educational Film Library Association (EFLA) and the University Film Producers Association (UFPA). Other organizations reflected the ever-broadening realms for small film use, including Film Council of America (FCA), National AudioVisual Association (NAVA), and the Allied Non-Theatrical Film Association (ANTFA).75 Founded in 1945, with annual meetings beginning in 1946, ANTFA declared itself the host of the “first national trade show for 16mm,” also significantly formalizing the term nontheatrical as the masthead for a burgeoning industry. Almost immediately ANTFA had over five hundred members and began holding regular annual conferences.76 In addition to new associations, groups that had formed prior to the war sprouted subgroups with a focus either on film or the broader category of “audiovisual” in which film technologies normally resided. This included the Department of Audio-Visual Instruction (DAVI, a suborganization of the National Education Association), indicating that some of the postwar enthusiasm for film technology was carried over from an investment in visual education and technological education that preceded the war.77 Collectively, this cluster of new organizations represented equipment manufacturers, film producers and distributors, educators, and citizen groups who channeled their interests through film, which thus included promoting mediated engagement with all manner of subjects: civil rights, sexual conduct, driver safety, gardening, travel, cybernetics, modern art and design. And on it went.78 Not only did new organizations devoted specifically to film and audiovisual machines emerge, but many organizations began to integrate such technologies into their operations. Public libraries for instance became active venues for film viewing and lending, with national rentals approaching upwards of seven hundred twenty thousand by 1958, generating a viewership of an estimated thirty-six million annually.79 Summarizing the explosive growth of the field, Paul Wagner, president of the Film Council for America, wrote: “Big Business, Big Associations, Big Schools—all formed audiovisual departments and gave social acceptance to a new group of specialists.”80 Often these businesses, associations, and schools had their own print bulletins, reviews, and newsletters, creating a

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paper trail of talk about film and resources for engaging with it.81 Further, film societies, film councils, and underground filmmakers and viewing circuits formed groups that were more specifically devoted to film as a unique expressive form categorized as avant-garde, political, and sometimes “foreign.”82 The volume of these collective activities is astonishing. Consider one small though outsized example. In 1952, the film council serving International Falls, Minnesota, population hovering around six thousand, sponsored 437 film events, at seventy-five unique venues. This amounted to more than one film event per day with an average of sixty people attending each screening. The total estimated audience that year was 27,679.83 This was just one of hundreds upon hundreds of small cities and towns with film groups in operation. Adding to the explosion of small-gauge film viewing, amateur and home filmmakers also significantly increased after the war, with 8 mm cameras and projectors notably outselling 16 mm throughout the 1950s.84 The field of industrial, advertising, and business filmmaking and viewing also surged, with international festivals and awards competitions arising to recognize maturation and artistry of the films.85 International circulation and use of these and other films expanded. Postwar organizations like UNESCO and specifically American organizations like the US Information Agency (USIA, 1953), which fell under the aegis of the State Department, incorporated film into their mandates. The USIA was essentially the US government’s foreign propaganda unit, establishing a global media footprint for the United States that built on preceding print and radio programs.86 It also augmented Hollywood’s increasingly important share of international markets.87 Throughout the 1950s, film remained relevant to ongoing military operations, with use in research and development, training, and public relations.88 While not tracked in the AV market reporting, military use of film and photography remained extensive, with an internal report penned in 1954 indicating that its branches had plainly institutionalized the broad and varied use of photography and film technologies to support “practically every activity of the Armed Forces.”89 This included what the report termed “instrumentation and technical photography,” “reconnaissance and mapping,” “documentation,” “training,” “public information,” and a category for “miscellany,” which encompassed largely bureaucratic uses such as microfilming. This report indicates that 75 percent of film and photographic activity was “strictly strategic,” referring to weapons development, ordnance testing, and aerial and underwater mapping, with 15 percent devoted to training, orientation films, and public information. This latter category alerts us to a prolific new PR branch of military-based

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media production. By the time of the 1954 report’s publication, a good deal of military footage was being handed over to major television networks, which in turn edited the material into its burgeoning programming needs. The Navy provided two and a half million feet of footage to NBC, which used it to create the series Victory at Sea. The Air Force had a similar arrangement with CBS. The Army issued a regularly scheduled twentyfive-minute program entitled The Big Picture that ran for years and was largely comprised of footage culled from its sizable film library generated during World War II. Film also maintained an active role in the bureaucratic and intraorganizational needs of the military, with technical and staff reports and briefing films continuing to perform key communication functions.90 In addition, the Department of Defense regularly lent its films to schools, clubs, churches, and other civilian organizations for no charge.91 Commercial film libraries purchased military films whose prices were kept low to bolster their circulation.92 And, while the whole of military operation relied on both 35 mm and 16 mm film, the 1954 report recommended eliminating 35 mm prints, except for the rare instance when a film was to be shown in a commercial theater.93 The reported military budget for film and photography was well over $100 million annually—almost $1 billion in 2019 dollars.94 Links between military and industrial film also persisted and grew, often with ideals of military-industrial efficiencies and innovations discussed together or in close proximity.95

Programmability In all of the discussion of device proliferation and projection networks, it is easy to overlook one of the most significant aspects of what was happening as a result of the radical increase of portable film technology: a previously unimagined capacity for programming. More people could show films in an exponential array of scenarios. Experts, specialists, partisans, and the simply curious gained access to an apparatus that invited a controlled, creative kind of techno-cultural performance. Serving this new set of possibilities was a prodigious supply of films that could be shown in alignment with an endless assortment of other films, printed texts, live viewing prompts, and an ever-changing configuration of viewing scenarios. Audience members could now readily gather to debate, protest, believe, buy, and learn. These devices maintained a mutually reciprocal relationship to a parallel explosion in the availability of titles for these machines. Anthony Slide has asserted that between 1949 and 1951, the number of film libraries servicing this sector had more than doubled from 897 to 2,002. By 1953, he indicates that 2,660

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film libraries were in full operation, with key concentrations in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, the latter serving as the epicenter of educational and industrial filmmaking.96 These film libraries ran the gamut from small and local to large and national. Some lent their prints for free, and some charged a fee. Public and private organizations alike built film libraries and lent films. Widely circulated film catalogs proliferated throughout the 1950s and for decades after. Companies such as Castle Films, Blackhawk, and Official Films distributed an impressive list of film types and untold numbers of prints— travelogues, news films, comedic shorts, war films, old Hollywood features, science films, social etiquette, and public safety films—all for 8 mm and 16 mm small-gauge projectors. NuArt Productions, Pacific Cine Productions, and Vanity Productions circulated erotic shorts.97 Brandon Films played a key role distributing socially progressive and foreign-made films for decades.98 Publishing interests such as Encylopaedia Brittanica and McGraw Hill, among others, adapted their print-based business models to encompass film, issuing educational content regularly. During the 1960s, Grove Press began disseminating experimental and avant-garde titles in 8 mm.99 A programming bonanza was created by what amounted to tens of thousands of titles and many more prints issued by these and other organizations. Everyday projectionists procured and played a vast body of diversified content on millions of portable machines. Among the many new kinds of films that were generated within this ferment was a subgenre whose primary purpose was to help people figure out what to do with all of those projectors and all of those films.100 While some of these titles were reduction prints of professional films initially shot on 35 mm film stock and intended for commercial cinemas, many more were made expressly for this new small-gauge circuit. An expansive production system emerged to service it. By 1959, industry statistics indicated 6,800 different active film production entities outside of Hollywood. Many of these “entities” were no more than single individuals operating independently or within organizations that had standing filmmakers on the payroll. One estimate indicates that there were at least 550 production companies that had an enduring base of employees.101 This number only grew in the decades that followed. By 1969, industry statistics indicated 14,200 nontheatrical new film titles were made for this field in that year alone. Compare this to the 151 features issued by the major Hollywood studios.102 Two-thirds of these so-called nontheatricals were “business and industry” films, with “government” and “education” claiming nineteen hundred and seventeen hundred titles respectively.103 Indeed,

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from the mid-1950s and well into the 1970s, industry numbers tell a story of consistent growth, with annual outputs of completed films more than doubling from 1956 to 1974, from seven thousand per year to seventeen thousand per year.104 Business and Industry films occupied a significant majority of titles during this period, constituting well over half of total films made. It appears that while schools had more projectors, business and industry made and used more films. This veritable new world of new media, available on demand to many different cross sections of public and private sectors, was galvanized by precipitously increasing numbers of portable projectors as well as cameras. The spike began with the war but continued long after. A confluence of capacities subtended the emergence of this dense, everyday, media substrate. Unlike the hot, immaculate big screen, these machines were comparably cool. Yet they offered a set of possibilities that traded ecstatic, seductive, all-encompassing rapture for another kind of notably portable attraction, one characterized by accessibility, user control, adaptability, and, most important of all, programmability. They rose on a postwar vision of a triumphant, technologically sophisticated nation and became standard elements of a technological common sense about the place of moving images and sounds within mediated life. Imparting a wide range of aesthetic experiences, modes of engagement and techno-social interfaces, portable projectors enlarged cinema’s apparatus. In so doing, this apparatus stretched to include something utterly distinct from the big-box, professional, and highly controlled film show. Rather, these small devices were tools of science, industry, and the military, as well as untold everyday purveyors of a new kind of film experience. Some of these encounters were local and specific, while others were fully engaged in matters of grave geopolitical consequence. There was no single portable projector, just as there was not one kind of projectionist. Many operations, institutions and applications constituted the whole of this midcentury media form. What is incontrovertible, however, is the sheer expanse of these small cinema machines. Numbering in the millions and significant for over half a century, they reveal a highly developed, mature film ecology that upends some of our most basic ideas about what cinema has been and where movies have happened. They secured this position during the period commonly referred to as Hollywood’s classical era, and long before the subsequent disruptions and dispersals of video and digital formats.

Epilogue Vectors of Portable Cinema

A young woman walks down a school hallway in 1947. She is on her way to class. All part of a daily routine, she is calm and in no particular rush, though her pace is steady. Dressed in a smart suit with sensible low heels to complement it, she gathers books in her folded left arm. With her right arm, she carries a portable film projector, bearing its weight and size with apparent ease (figure 30). She is ready and equipped. Of course, she reads. But she is also an impresario of audiovisual performance. As such, she conveys a new set of possibilities for mediated engagement: movies anytime, anywhere. Across the country tens of thousands of other men and women were also carrying projectors to classrooms, as well as to clubs, government offices, and factory floors. A decade later, millions of these everyday projectionists would join in. Such machines were sold as part of a futureforward ideal. They were given names such as “Envoy,” “Lite-Weight,” and “Pageant,” signaling portability and movement. This was a new kind of cinema. It came in a box with a handle. Often stylish and accommodating of the ambulatory human body, the device could be ushered around like a briefcase or valise. These little machines were made to be carried, moved about, and adapted to an array of spaces: dark, dim, small, big, narrow. During the American midcentury, they were less the diminutive underlings of the grand movie palace and more sentinels of the rising tide of compact, nimble media that would ascend ever after. While film technologies were born portable, small-gauge machines grew in fits and starts, propelled notably in the 1920s by industrial consolidation and innovation and on the energies of a surging belief that the future of cinema was not beholden to the commercial and highly constrained theater. Rather, a dialogue about film’s future was set in motion by engineers, showmen, artists, theorists, hobbyists, activists, and others intent on 176

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figure 30. A young woman carries a Victor Animatograph projector down a school hallway in 1947, transforming cinema into a machine that could be easily carried and fit harmoniously with daily activities. Images like this were typical during this period, featuring men, women, and children conveying portable movie boxes. (Photo by Haberich-Blessing Studio, Chicago, courtesy of Victor Animatograph Records, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa).

exploring the ways in which projected images and sounds might service a range of functions and experiences. Amateur and home filmmaking enthusiasts moved things along, but so too did the significant investments of American business and industry. Community, educational, governmental, civic, and religious uses of film also thrived. These groups were often not makers of films but showers of film; they needed a way to light up a screen. Under the umbrella of the military and its unprecedented mobilization of people and resources during World War II, small projectors were also summoned to patriotic duty. War created an outsized and pressing need for efficient machines. Accordingly, the armed services called for a device that could deliver anywhere and at any time standardized, projected, audiovisual messages, information, data, training, and entertainment. Portable projectors ascended rapidly on demands for modern audiovisual methods in all military operations: interoffice communication, battlefront briefs, solider orientation, education and healing, munitions testing, moraleboosting, and strategizing. Engineered with well-defined operational goals

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in mind, these military machines were designed to be rugged, fixable, flexible, easy to use, and able to be running at any moment. Not the occasional devices of the tinkerer-hobbyist, these were working, fighting machines whose operation was expected to be steady and adaptable to all terrains, climates, and conflicts. With industrial and military triumphalism, projectors marched into the American midcentury, riding high on victory and boasting an international footprint. Amped-up production levels continued, and these little suitcase models flowed freely from assembly lines. They arrived in public and private, local and national organizations, and also in the hands of individual consumers. While they remained essential to American military operations for decades, these small projectors also became everyday media, showing everyday movies understood as such. The immediate postwar period ushered in a sizable, enduring, and influential infrastructure for film performance and use constituted by small projectors. By the middle of the 1950s, the projected images and sounds they emitted were integral to official and unofficial, authoritative and radical techno-human encounters. No oddball one-off or new-tech fad, this infrastructure grew for another thirty years. As a result, an affordable, accessible, quotidian capacity to select, program, and show moving images and to play their sounds arose. Film organizations emerged to consolidate and further the application of these technologies, and a still-uncalculated number of films led to a busy traffic in movies. Individual titles traveled from one projector to the next in an array of patterns that mirrored the structured but also unpredictable movements of previous media similarly possessed of the capacity to move: books, postcards, photographs, phonographs, magazines. Portable film technologies were an alternative to the movie theater, but their significance and capacities are also resolutely interwoven with the other portable media that preceded, accompanied, and followed their rise long after. Consequently, they demonstrate a definite and clear expansion of film’s iterative and multimedia forms and functions, providing the connective tissue that links a wide and often contradictory set of phenomena. This new infrastructure opens up the kinds of films we are called upon to think about, and the variety of institutions, industries, and spaces that are relevant to our research. Studying them creates a multiformat view to a fuller history of cinema in the United States and beyond. Examining portable projectors helps us to better understand what film has been technologically as well as aesthetically, socially, politically, and institutionally. It reveals a highly diversified range of visual and audile interfaces with the world that appeared and reappeared throughout the twentieth century in a surprising number of locations. These were dynamic

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devices with complex entanglements. Looking at them closely confirms the importance of distinguishing the various elements and changing iterations of what has been called “cinema” and “the cinematic apparatus,” which were plainly never just one thing. Assessing the scale and broad impact of these small machines shows that far too much is lost when we wrongly ascribe an unchanging coherence to a particular medium across time, geography, cultures, and politics—even at their most dominant and seemingly powerful phases of settlement. Following Raymond Williams, William Uricchio has argued that writing media histories requires a capacious definition of what media are in the first instance. Any such definition must assume that media are technologies, institutions, and texts, as well as elements of whole social orders and lived experiences. Such an approach requires an embrace of “multiplicity, complexity and even contradiction.”1 Charting and assessing the legacies of portable projectors is not just a way to resituate the place of the commercial movie theater in the history of moving images. It is not simply an invitation to talk about neglected genres of film or to catalog the obscure venues in which movies appeared. It is, rather, to assert that cinema was not uniform, simple, or unchanging; it was implicated in a “whole social order” and unpredictable forces of adaptation, appropriation, and experiment. As a portable apparatus, some of cinema’s devices serviced local, individual, and communal configurations; others were actively devoted to social justice, artistic experiment, or bodily pleasure. Many more acted as tools of industry and state. Future work will require concepts calibrated to assess this complexity. Small projectors provide a generative set of questions about film’s past. Thinking about portability and projectability guides us to the negotiated materialities of showing movies and the persistent rearticulations of cinema’s images and sounds to a range of underexamined performance scenarios. Set free from the professionalized show that essentially happens to us, portable machines alert us to the agency but also the elasticity of the projected form. With portable projectors, programming films, commanding an audience, orchestrating a show, and creating an experience became widely available forms of media engagement. Movies were thus flexible materials in multifarious, deliberate, and sometimes coordinated encounters. Image mechanics such as size, brightness, speed, volume, and density were all discussed, debated, and purposed to orchestrate the ever-adapting portable film event. All of these vectors of projected light and amplified sound demonstrate the range of presentational dynamics entailed by moving-image projection. Data, information, news, commodities, bureaucracy, government policy, industry, and sex have long been illuminated, projected, amplified

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moving-image phenomena. This more inclusive way of conceptualizing the history of projected film must also account for images that were half-bright, grainy, small, still and moving, quiet and loud, spectacular and banal, experimental and pedestrian. By examining the use of film technologies within the military, business, and industrial spheres, we see that film’s presentation dynamics also yielded many functions: observation, efficiency, storage, retrieval, analysis, selling, exhibition, display, and grunt procedure. Projectors were tools of decompression that amplified everyday expression and performance, reframing how we see and hear. Portable projectors were not an exclusively American phenomenon, obviously. They were international and likely had even greater impact in contexts wherein movie theaters did not obtain the commercially dominant status they did in the United States. More work is required to understand the ways these little machines did and did not shape film and media cultures both as formal tools of state and as informal techniques of art, as agents of control, and as instruments of subversion and critique across both national and transnational spheres. To be sure, portability persistently influenced how film developed and transformed for decades, reshaping the postwar world order and creating the lasting grooves of the media that followed. This includes the subsequent dynamics of video as well as the handheld devices that connect us to the World Wide Web. Portable projectors normalized moving images and sounds as everyday phenomena. They remind us of the crucial transformative factor of media heft and the human interfaces enabled by portability and its associated properties: ease of use, adaptability, programmability, affordability—properties that continue to shape media use. For at least two decades, 16 mm has been discussed largely in the context of its passing. Indeed, institutions began actively deaccessioning their collections, replacing now-dated analogue film technologies with new magnetic and then digital ones. Notable outcries and a sense of loss pervade these discussions. Film scholars have been particularly vocal, partly because the development of their university-based profession is unthinkable without portable projection.2 Indeed, insofar as 16 mm has long been a paradigmatic distribution format, film scholars have been primary beneficiaries. Without the film libraries, distribution circuits, and playback devices that the format enabled, teaching, analyzing, and making knowledge from moving images would be a highly improbable undertaking. The basic ability to select a film and to watch it as you wish is a commonsense precondition for any modicum of serious study.3 It is hard to imagine a literature department without access to books, or a chemistry department without

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chemicals. To be sure, the most basic ways in which even the study of film has evolved as a form of knowledge predicated on being able to see and hear films again and again, and slowly, sometimes frame by frame, is fully dependent on adaptable, user-friendly projectors. In addition, many of the primary subareas of our field grew precisely from the capacity of these machines to enable access and control over film viewing (and to a degree filmmaking), their basic existence catalyzing new ideas about where, when, why, and how we watch. Documentary, experimental, and pornographic films—as cultural phenomena and also as objects of study—have long been inseparable from the fact and possibilities presented by these small viewing machines.4 In particular, a generation of artists evolved forms that were medium specific and explored the precise affordances of these small-gauge machines.5 Recently, small, local subcultural entities such as micro-cinemas have emerged, continuing the practice of showing old film prints in basements, bars, and pubs.6 A new cohort of artists is also reclaiming smallgauge technologies by exploring their specificities under the rubric of often materialist, and sometimes ecological, art practices.7 From medium-specific tool to expansive distribution system, small-gauge film formats have been foundational and continue to remind us, if even in humble ways, of their sizable presence. This book has not focused on subcultural or minoritarian small-gauge film activity. I have avoided dwelling on these not because I believe that such activities are unimportant but because so much else about small-gauge cinema has remained unaddressed. Even with the millions of portable projectors mapped here, many questions are still unanswered. For instance, the historical multitude of projectors documented throughout Everyday Movies does not necessarily prove their constant use or the incessant ignition of ever-diversifying viewing scenarios. Many of these devices broke down, worked poorly, and likely suffered demotion from cherished new showpiece to basement clutter. Others retained only a highly regimented and limited range of functions. Yet, as elements in a sizable and significant media infrastructure, portable projectors collectively indicate a basic fact: for over fifty years there existed a widespread capacity to project films. This capacity shaped a thriving small-film infrastructure, supported by an enormous body of titles and innumerable groups and individuals devoted to it. Small-film formats lasted about as long as broadcast television in North America and what we call Classical Hollywood Cinema. They persisted significantly longer than video cassettes, VCRs, and DVDs. Yet we know comparably little about them. The basic fact of these projectors, their past and present figurations, provide a view to a sustained set of possibilities for

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future work in film and media history. This includes explanations for how most movies were presented and seen for the better half of the twentieth century. The portable projector arose from the power and creative ferment of the consolidating film industry and its sprawling technological base. It gradually became integral to a growing recognition of moving images as familiar, abundant, programmable, accessible, convenient, easy-to-use, private, individual, and adaptable. That these things are so ordinary now provides a quick index to how the cultural work of the portable projector was also to make moving image and sounds into familiar elements of not just how we carry things but how we carry ourselves, forever shaping how we navigate our mediated world.

Notes

Collections Cited in Notes George Eastman House, Rochester, NY High M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, University of Southern California Archives and Manuscripts, New York Public Library Thomas Brandon Papers, Film Library, Museum of Modern Art National Archives Records Administration Victor Animatograph Corporate Records, Special Collections University of Iowa, Iowa City J Walter Thompson Company Collection, and Kodakiana Collection, Duke University Museum of the Moving Image, Queens, New York Media History Digital Library Prelinger Archives, San Francisco Special Collections, UC Santa Barbara

Introduction 1. For an examination of portable televisions see Lynn Spigel, “Portable TV: Studies in Domestic Space Travel,” in Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 2. Film Daily Yearbook cited in Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), appendix 1, 461. 3. Data for 1947 is from “1954 Census Report on the United States Photographic Equipment and Supplies Industry,” in Report from Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, cited in Augustus Wolfman, 1959 Annual Statistical Report: The Photographic Industry in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: Photo Dealer Magazine, 1959), 8–9.

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4. Film Daily Yearbook cited in Peter Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen 1950–1959 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), appendix 2, 304. 5. “8 and 16 mm Motion Picture Projector Shipments by U. S. Manufacturers,” in Augustus Wolfman, ed., 1960 Annual Statistical Report: The Photographic Industry in the United States, 4th ed. (New York: Photo Dealer Magazine, 1960), 20. Important here also is the noted contrast with 16  mm camera shipments, which domestically equaled 7,300 and combined with imports of 8,500 totaled 15, 800, less than a third the number of 16 mm projectors (Wolfman, 1960 Annual Report, 20–21). Statistics on projectors were published regularly in the annual reports entitled The Wolfman Report on the Photographic Industry in the United States, compiled by Augustus Wolfman. These reports began to appear in the mid-1950s in annual issues of Photo Dealer magazine and during later years were published by Modern Photography and Popular Photography as stand-alone publications until the early 1990s. Wolfman compiled statistics from the US Bureau of the Census as well as published studies issued by elements of the audiovisual industry. He died in 1974, though reports continued to be issued using his name. 6. This was cited by Wolfman in 1970–71 Wolfman Report on Photographic Industry in the United States, ed. Augustus Wolfman (New York: Modern Photography, 1970), 62. Originally published as an estimate by Thomas W. Hope in AV-USA 1969 (Rochester: Hope Reports Inc., 1970). These numbers for portable devices do not include estimates for silent 16 mm projectors, which continued to sell over ten thousand per year throughout the 1950s, likely constituting well over a hundred thousand operating projectors (see tables in chapter 4). 7. Indeed, the industry standard Hope Report, assembled by Thomas Hope, who regularly reported to the Hollywood film industry, indicated that 16 mm projector sales in the early years of 1970 were at their highest in a forty-year history. Hope documented nearly eighty thousand sound units sold in 1971. See “Equipment,” in Thomas W. Hope, AV-USA 1969 (Rochester: Hope Reports Inc., 1970), 29. Throughout the later 1970s and 1980s, sales of 16 mm were in clear decline, but an infrastructure remained in place and in operation throughout the decade. See “AV Installed Equipment Base,” in Thomas Hope, ed., Media Market Trends 5 (Rochester: Hope Reports, Inc., 1989), table 3, p.  12. This report indicated that 16  mm projectors maintained a significant presence across institutional spheres, with an estimated 1,356,700 projectors extant. Theatrical screens numbered 13,331 in 1979. Cited from the Motion Picture Association of America in David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), appendix 5, 491. 8. This approach is very much inspired by work across media history, but in particular television studies. Key scholars have crafted histories of television that are themselves less focused on making TV and more on the social, institutional, and cultural dynamics of its viewing devices and their locations. Two key foundational texts are Lynn Spigel’s classic Make Room for TV: Television

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and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Anna McCarthy’s agenda-setting Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). For more recent work see Kitt Hughes, Television and Work: Industrial Media and American Labor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 9. Mark Katz has argued that the phonograph transformed listening habits and sensibilities about music in the United States promulgating three distinctive qualities of recorded music: portability, affordability, and repeatability. Together, he argues, these qualities helped the phonograph to increase access to and engagement with more kinds of music across class, race-based, and rural/urban divides. Katz also traces the qualitatively different approaches to study and appreciation that access and repeated listening enabled that were distinct from live performance. See Mark Katz, “Making America More Musical through the Phonograph, 1900–1930,” American Music 16, no. 4 (1998), 448–76. Patrick Feaster has also addressed the crucial changes introduced by the phonograph, which he argues is no simple playback device or representational tool but a complex technology deeply implicated in new kinds of listening (private), new activities (dancing, education), and also new modes of creativity (recorded sound). See “Phonography,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015) 146–57. 10. For further discussion of informality and its importance for contemporary media circulation see Ramon Lobato and Julian Thomas, The Informal Media Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015) and the earlier Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (Basingstoke: British Film Institute, 2012). 11. “Concentrated Entertainment,” Popular Mechanics 75, no. 6 (1941): 135. 12. For more on 16 mm in the home during the 1920s see Haidee Wasson “Electric Homes! Automatic Movies! Efficient Entertainment! Domesticity and the 16mm Projector in the 1920s,” Cinema Journal 48, no. 4 (2009): 1–21. 13. Kodak’s Business Kodascope featured a self-contained translucent screen that measured 5½ by 7 inches and played in fully lit offices. It also packed up much like a “sample case.” Good for an audience of one or many, the projector could be turned around and projected onto a wall or larger screen. “The Eastman Business Kodascope,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 12, no. 36 (1928): 1175. The museum film viewer is discussed in relation to activities at the Museum of Natural History (New York City) by Alison Griffiths in “‘Automatic Cinema’ and Illustrated Radio: Multimedia in the Museum,” in Residual Media, ed. Charles Acland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2007), 69–96. 14. Andrea Kelley, Soundies: Jukebox Films and the Shift to Small-Screen Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018). 15. This project was advertised in the journals Business Screen, Educational Screen, and Movie Makers. For example, see “Projection Plus: The New Kodascope L” Movie Makers 10, no. 1 (1935): 26–27.

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16. Ibid., 27. 17. Such devices are discussed more extensively in chapter 2. 18. For more on this, see the volume Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex, in particular essays by Kaia Scott, “Managing the Trauma of Labor: Military Psychiatric Cinema in World War II,” and Andrea Kelly “Mobilizing the Moving Image: Movie Machines at US Military Bases and Veteran’s Hospitals during World War II,” in Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex ed. Haidee Wasson and Lee Grieveson (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). 19. For an excellent consideration of sound and the decades of non-synch sound practices that typified amateur movie making and presentation, see Liz Czach, “The Sound of Amateur Film,” Film History 30, no. 3 (2018): 75–102. Steve Wurtzler has documented the easy availability of vinyl LPs from the 1960s with sound effects for a “picture evening.” See “Sound and Domestic Screens,” Cinema Journal 51, no. 2 (2012): 153–57. 20. “Which One Speaks 7 Languages,” advertisement for Kodak Pageant Projector Business Screen 8, no.18 (1957): 49. Advertisements for the Pageant line of projectors can easily be found in old issues of Business Screen and Educational Screen through the Media History Digital Library. Magnetic projectors were also marketed by Kodak as easy to use. See for example the ad title: “Set These Few Controls and Make Your Own Sound Movies” Kodak advertisement Business Screen 18, no. 6 (1957): 47. For “men on the go,” see “Have Projector . . . Will Travel” Kodak advertisement Business Screen (1957): 45. 21. Other major projector manufacturers also made magnetic projectors, including RCA, Victor Animatograph, Ampro, and Bell and Howell. 22. Importantly, sound-on-film came first to portable film projectors that could play reduction prints from 35 mm with synchronized sound tracks. The history of amateur and small-gauge film sound is as complex as that of professional film presentation, with a long history of sounds added at the time of projection. Techniques included using phonographs, radios, live sounds, and eventually magnetic tape. Sound-on-film took much longer to become a standard element of small-gauge filmmaking. Liz Czach charts the uneven entry of 16 mm sound filmmaking, first introduced in the mid-1930s. See Czach, “The Sound of Amateur Film.” 23. Silent-only 8 mm and 16 mm projectors continued to be sold into the 1970s. Sound-on-film Super 8 cameras, which recorded sound simultaneously with image-capture, appeared in 1973. For charts that list manufacture dates of select small-gauge equipment, see Alan D. Kattelle, Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897–1979 (Nashua, NH: Transition Publishing, 2000), 338–60. It is also useful to note that films initially recorded with synch-sound could then be reduced to play on small-gauge formats. For instance, 8 mm sound projectors could play reduction-printed films from 35 mm and 16 mm as early as 1960. Erika Balsom charts the importance of this for expanding the field of experimental film distribution and exhibition. See

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After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 56. 24. Eric Hoyt has addressed some of these dynamics in his important book on Hollywood film libraries. See Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014), in particular chapters 3 and 4. 25. Rick Altman, “Lectures, Sound Effects, and The Itinerant Exhibition Model,” in Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 133–56; and Altman, “From Lecturer’s Prop to Industrial Product: The Early History of Travel Films,” in The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism, ed. Jonathan Kahana and Charles Musser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). See also Musser and Carol Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991) and Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 26. For one of the more recent and authoritative versions of this, see André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: from Kinematography to Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011). 27. For work that maps itinerant projection through the 1930s, see Greg Waller, “Robert Southard and the History of Traveling Film Exhibition,” Film Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2004): 2–14, and Martin Johnson, Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). 28. For the most canonical articulation of this phase and its impact on film style, see David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 2015). 29. See Richard Maltby, “The Production Code and the Hays Office,” in Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939, ed. Tino Balio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 37–72. 30. For general discussions of these shifts see Schatz, Boom and Bust and Lev, The Fifties. Important to note is that Lev’s history of American cinema in the 1950s does not mention small gauge or portable film technologies once. More nuanced histories of the relationship of television to cinema during this period are emerging. Eric Hoyt has shown that television was ultimately and fairly quickly a boon to studio revenue. See Hoyt, Hollywood Vault. 31. For the best discussion of this era with regard to the rise of big cinema and blockbuster films as an ascendant business model in Hollywood see: Charles Acland, American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, Wonder (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 32. For an overview of specifically big and wide screens during this period, see Ariel Rogers, Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), especially chapters 1 and

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2; and John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 33. The unevenness of how film’s wore over time was particularly pertinent to films wherein the most intense appeals of a movie might reside in particular scenes. Anecdotal reports from the field suggest that, for instance, pornographic films tended to be used especially for select scenes, leading to highly specific wear and tear. 34. Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 35. Lucas Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 6. 36. Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). 37. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version” (1935), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2008), 19–55. Samuel Weber has elaborately explored Benjamin’s tendency to work with potential; capacity; or, as he has articulated it, “abilities” across his writing. See Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 38. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 20. 39. See Nancy Martha West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 19–35. 40. Marita Sturken writes about the history of advertising and Kodak, surveying its practices from the turn of the twentieth century up to the twentyfirst. See: “Advertising and the Rise of Amateur Photography: From Kodak and Polaroid to the Digital Image,” Advertising and Society Quarterly 18, no. 3 (2017), doi:10.1353/asr.2017.0021. 41. See Michael Brian Schiffer, The Portable Radio in American Life (Tucson: University of Arizona Press), 1991. 42. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 2. 43. Patricia Zimmerman and Charles Tepperman have documented the rise of amateur filmmaking that came with small-gauge standardization. See Zimmerman, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), and Tepperman, Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923—1960 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014). See also more recent work on amateur cinema that has expanded the geographies of such movements and worked to understand the enduring and complex institutional configurations of so-called amateurism. See Enrique Fibla and Masha Salazkina’s coedited special issue, “Toward a Global History of Amateur Film Practices and Institutions,” Film History 30,

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no. 1 (Spring 2018), and their edited collection, Global Perspectives on Amateur Histories and Cultures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021). 44. Many such manifestos have been published in Scott MacKenzie’s magnificent collection entitled Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). See in particular George Kuchar, “Kuchar 8 mm Film Manifesto” (USA, 1964), 69; JoAnn Elam and Chuck Kleinhans, “Small Gauge Manifesto (USA, 1980), 87; and Amos Vogel, “Statement of Purposes” (USA, 1948), 527–28, specifically devoted to Cinema 16. 45. Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La CaméraStylo,” in The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks, ed. Peter Graham with Ginette Vincendeau (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 17–23. Trans. from “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: La caméra-stylo,” L’Écran Français 144, no. 30 (March 1948). 46. Cinéma vérité and direct cinema became crucial stylistic movements predicated precisely on lightweight camera equipment and on- location magnetic sound recording devices. The importance of lightweight cameras for postwar film aesthetics is a standard element of such histories. See, for instance, Betsy A. McLane, A New History of Documentary Film (New York: Continuum, 2012). For an excellent international survey of camera equipment at midcentury, see H. Mario Raimondo-Souto, Motion Picture Photography: A History, 1891–1960 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2007) 293–307. 47. These influences grew particularly rich during the 1960s. See, for instance, Balsom, After Uniqueness. For an examination of Ken Jacobs’s work, widely considered a crucial experimental filmmaker who also played with multiprojector but also multimedia performances, see Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur, eds., Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Andrew Uroskie explicitly discusses the importance of small technologies in New York art circles during the mid-1960s. See Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2014). Discussions of the importance of small-gauge equipment run throughout the journal Film Culture published from 1955 for decades with Jonas Mekas at its helm, as well as in Mekas’s regular articles for the Village Voice throughout the 1960s. See also Kristen Alfaro, “Access and the Experimental Film: New Technologies and Anthology Film Archives’ Institutionalization of the Avant-Garde,” The Moving Image 12, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 44–64. For a fantastic examination of the importance of Sally Dixon and museum-based support for small-gauge experimental film, see Benjamin Odrodnik, “Forging an Alternative Cinema: Sally Dixon, the Film Section, and the Museum-Based Media Center,” Film History 31, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 144–78. 48. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970). See also Uroskie, Between the Black Box, and Tess Takahashi, “Experimental

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Screens in the 1960s and 1970s: The Site of Community,” Cinema Journal 51, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 162–67. 49. See Lenny Lipton, Independent Filmmaking, with an introduction by Stan Brakhage (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972). A revised edition of this book was published in 1983. Other books featuring Lipton’s ideas include The Super 8 Book (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975) and Lipton on Filmmaking (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1979), both edited by Chet Roaman. 50. Pavle Levi, Cinema by Other Means (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Uroskie, Between the Black Box; Ji-Hoon Kim, “The Post-Medium Condition and the Explosion of Cinema,” Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 114–39. Balsom, After Uniqueness; Noam M. Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 51. For a canonical articulation of cinema as an “ideological apparatus,” see: Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metaphysical Approaches to the Impress of Reality in the Cinema,” and “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Phillip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 299– 318 and 286–98. See also Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, edited by Teresa De Lauretis and Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan, 1980), 121–42. While this model has been widely appropriated as well as criticized as ahistorical and deterministic, it persists as a basic concept in the discipline of film studies. More recently its seeming rigidity has been replaced by more flexible models that embrace the idea of “dispositifs,” which, following the work of Michel Foucault, allow for social and institutional structures that are historical. See for instance Frank Kessler, “The Cinema of Attractions as Dispositif,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2006), 57–69; Francesco Casetti, The Lumiere Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); and Thomas Elsaesser, “The New Film History as Media Archaeology,” Cinemas 14, nos. 2–3 (2004): 75–117. While important and generative, these scholars tend to use early and “late” or digital cinema phenomena as raw materials for speculating about nonlinear, multiple dispositifs. See also Francois Alberra and Maria Tortajada, eds., CineDispositives: Essays in Epistemology across Media (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2015). 52. Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde,” 19. 53. John Grierson, “Summary and Survey of 1935,” in Forsyth Hardy, ed., Grierson on Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 69. 54. For a discussion of the modernist poet H.D. and her writings about film and the significance of portable projection, see Anne Friedberg, “And I Myself Have Learned to Use the Small Projector: On H.D., Woman, History, Recognition,” Wide Angle 5, no. 2 (1982): 26–31. Many essays advocating for more control over exhibition and distribution are evident in journals such as Close Up, a selection of whose essays can be found in the edited collection of

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James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus, eds., Close Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998). For the American context see also Harry Alan Potamkin’s writing, published in Lewis Jacobs, ed., The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 1977). See especially “The Ritual of the Movies” (1933 orig.), 216–21, wherein he argues against bourgeois ideas of art appreciation and the ritualization of movie watching in the form of film societies and instead advocates for community-based motion picture study clubs and film councils. His opinions were widely circulated in the National Board of Review Magazine. 55. For excellent examples of this in the European context see: Malte Hagner, Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-Grade and the Invention of Film Culture (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007). For the United States, the best overview of the interwar period remains Jan Christopher Horak’s Lovers of Cinema: The First American Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). For an early examination of the importance of 16 mm for early art film circuits see Haidee Wasson Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). For key works on the development of amateur cinema networks see Zimmerman, Reel Families; Tepperman, Amateur Cinema; and Fibla and Salazkina Global Perspectives. 56. Brightness and volume settings on televisions, tablets, and phones provide a productive comparable case here, whereby brightness and volume settings can be adjusted for context and type of use. 57. Gitelman discusses this in relation to listening, borrowing from literary scholars on reading in Always Already New. See chapter 2 in particular. 58. Gitelman writes: “So it is as much of a mistake to write broadly of ‘the telephone,’ ‘the camera,’ or ‘the computer’ as it is ‘the media,’ and of—now, somehow, ‘the internet’ and ‘the web’—naturalizing or essentializing technologies as if they were unchanging, ‘immutable objects given, self-defining properties’ around which changes swirl, and to or from which histories proceed. Specificity and context are crucial (Always Already New, 8). For a highly readable application of this assertion and what it means for television in the age of streaming see Amanda Lotz, Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television (Ann Arbor, MI: Maize Books, 2017) DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10 .3998/mpub.9699689. William Uricchio has been arguing a similar position for years, largely building on the intellectual legacies of Raymond Williams and British Cultural Studies. For a succinct synthesis of his thinking see “Historicizing Media in Transition,” in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 23–39. 59. Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 60. Examples are numerous and include: Charles R. Acland, “Curtains, Carts and the Mobile Screen,” Screen 50, no. 1 (Spring 2008), 148–66; Ariel Rogers, On the Screen: Displaying the Moving Image, 1926–1942 (New York:

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Columbia University Press, 2019); and Kelley, Soundies. Under the rubric of design and also sponsored film see Justus Nieland, Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). See also Alice Lovejoy, “Celluloid Geopolitics: Film Stock and the War Economy, 1939–47, Screen 60, no. 2 (Summer 2019) 224–41; Julie Turnock, Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); William Paul, When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); and Stephen Groening, Cinema beyond Territory: In Flight Entertainment and Atmospheres of Globalization (London: British Film Institute, 2014). 61. This body of work is growing rapidly. Three foundational books set this agenda. They are: Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, eds., Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, eds., Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2009); and Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson, eds., Useful Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). For subsequent work see Wasson and Grieveson, eds., Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex; Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); Michael Cowan, Walter Ruttman and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde—Advertising—Modernity (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2014); James Cahill, Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Florian Hoof, Angels of Efficiency: A Media History of Consulting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Bo Florin, Nico de Klerk, and Patrick Vonderau, eds., Films That Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising (London: British Film Institute, 2017); Allyson Nadia Field and Marsha Gordon, eds., Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 62. See Salazkina, and Fibla, “Toward a Global History. A voluble body of scholarship on China, India, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Africa, and South America is contributing to a greater understanding of the ways that informal, itinerant, and “gray” economies as well as mobile media units have long characterized cinema outside of highly industrialized Western centers of power, further displacing the centrality of the theater to the cultural technologies of cinema, and asserting vans, trains, roads as integral. See also Rielle Navitski, “The Cine Club de Colombia and Postwar Cinephilia in Latin America: Forging Transnational Networks, Schooling Local Audiences,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 38, no. 4 (December 2018): 808–27; Richard L. MacDonald “Projecting Films to Spirits: On Shrines as Conjunctural Space and the Ritual Economy of Outdoor Cinema in Bangkok,” Visual Anthropology Review 33, no. 2 (November 2017): 152–63; Zoë Druick, “At the Margins of Cinema History: Mobile Cinema in the British Empire,” Public 40 (2010): 118– 25; Hongwei Thorn Chen, “Cinemas, Highways, and the Making of Provincial

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Space: Mobile Screenings in Jiangus, China, 1933–1937,” Wide Screen 7, no. 1 (March 2017): 1–34; Tamara Falicov, “Mobile Cinemas in Cuba: The Forms and Ideology of Traveling Exhibitions,” Public 40 (2009): 104–8; Rebecca Harrison, “Inside the Cinema Train: Britain, Empire and Modernity in the Twentieth Century,” Film History 26, no. 4 (2014): 32–57; Ravi Vasudevan, “Official and Amateur: Exploring Information Film in India, 1920s–1940s,” in Film and the End of Empire, ed. Lee Grieveson and Colin McCabe (London: British Film Institute, 2011), 73–94; also Vasudevan, “In the Centrifuge of History” Cinema Journal 50, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 135–40. For the role of portable film units in the history of the British Empire see the two volumes by Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe, Film and the End of Empire and Empire and Film (London: British Film Institute, 2011). For an examination of American military filmmaking in Vietnam, see James Paasche, “Shots Made around the World: DASPO’s Documentation of the Vietnam War,” 241–58; and in Korea, see Sueyoung Park-Primiano, “Occupation, Diplomacy, and the Moving Image: The US Army as Cultural Interlocutor in Korea, 1945–1948,” 227–40, both in Wasson and Grieveson, Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex. 63. Closely related to this are the ways in which the persistent positioning of the movie theater as the peak of film viewing have then further shaped the ways we value some film and media over others, grounded variously in technophilic, industrial, and cultural hierarchies. As Barbara Klinger has noted, such hierarchies often work to subjugate (and obscure) other forms of moving image reproduction and performance that could not logically be compared. For instance, in her important book on home theaters, Klinger demonstrates that discourses of home video frequently emulated theatrical ideals, inevitably positioning home video as “not-cinema” and hence inferior. See Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 64. This work is also increasingly voluminous and sophisticated. A good deal of it is emerging under the rubric of “new cinema history,” a branch of film scholarship that was crucial for expanding film studies beyond formal, film-centric analysis and toward social and institutional approaches. Debates about actual moviegoers and audiences have also been pivotal, and importantly, have become more international. For the most recent edited collection devoted to “new cinema history,” see Daniël Bilteresyt, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers, eds., The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History, (New York: Routledge, 2019). For an early agenda-setting treatise on movie theaters see Greg Waller, Mainstreet Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1995); and for a still-pathbreaking book on feminist film reception studies see Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 65. Gabriele Pedullà, In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators after the Cinema, trans. Patricia Gaborik (New York: Verso, 2012), 2. Grieveson traces the ways in which talking about cinema-as-films must also be understood as a

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way of talking about cinema-as-spaces from the medium’s earliest days, as the conflicts that inevitably arose to manage both were discursively inextricable. See Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-TwentiethCentury America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 4–6. 66. For a rigorous assessment of this term, its importance for film history, and what it entails for future work, see Greg Waller, “The New Nontheatrical Cinema History,” in The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History, ed. Daniël Bilteresyt, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers (New York: Routledge, 2019), 55–64. For an excellent discussion of the term “nontheatrical” and what it might mean for noncapitalist contexts see: Luci Cˇesálková, “Kind-Barons and Noble Minds: Specifics of Film Exhibition beyond Commercial Entertainment,” in Bilteresyt, et al. eds., The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History, 305–18. 67. See Gitelman, “Media as Historical Subjects,” in Always Already New. 68. See Elsaesser, “The New Film History.” In this article, Elsaesser clings tightly to a special affinity between early and digital cinema, overlooking what falls in between. In more recent work his vectors of analysis are more fluid, linking 3D cinema innovations to a more fulsome array of historical periods and areas of activity, from avant-garde art to military technologies and weather prediction. See Thomas Elsaesser, “The ‘Return’ of 3-D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies on the Image in the Twenty-First Century,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 217–46. Much of his writing about film history as it intersects with thinking specifically about contemporary media, usually digital technologies, can be found in Film History as Media Archaeology (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2016). See also Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and the inspired essay by Huhtamo, “Elements of Screenology: Toward an Archaeology of the Screen,” Iconics 7 (2004): 31–82. For examinations of television see William Uricchio, “Film, Cinema, Television . . . Media?” New Review of Film and Television Studies 12, no. 3, (June 2014): 266–79, wherein he encourages us to move beyond histories that rely on film’s roots in photography and to consider those that reside in wireless and electrical forms. See also his more recent “Selling the Motion Picture to the Fin de Siècle American Public,” in Films That Sell, 71–82. See also Hughes, Television at Work; Spigel, Make Room for Television; and TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and McCarthy, Ambient Television.

Chapter One. Engineering Portability 1. See, for instance, the much referred-to essays Roland Barthes, “Upon Leaving the Movie Theater,” trans. Bertrand Augst and Susan White University Publishing, 6 (Winter 1979): 3; or Dudley Andrew, “Film and Society: Public Rituals and Private Space,” in Exhibition: The Film Reader, ed. Ina Rae Hark (London: Routledge, 2002),161–72.

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2. For the most enduring and foundational theoretical meditation on the role of theaters as crucial elements in an entire, if complex, apparatus, see Baudry, “The Apparatus,” and “Ideological Effects” in Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 299–318 and 286–98. See also Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in De Lauretis and Heath, The Cinematic Apparatus, 121–42. 3. For fascinating considerations of the way the phonograph transformed ideas about and practices of sound, see Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Mark Katz, “The Amateur in the Age of Mechanical Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 459–79. 4. See Zimmerman, Reel Families; and Tepperman, Amateur Cinema. 5. Brian Jacobson has recently documented the ways in which fire risk shaped ideas about cinema and safety, as well as the design of specific kinds of controlled environments required to support it. He also examines the place of movie-theater fires in film history. See: “Fire and Failure: Studio Technology, Environmental Control, and the Politics of Progress” Cinema Journal 57, no. 2 (Winter 2018): 22–43. 6. See Musser, The Emergence of the Cinema; and Altman, Silent Film Sound. 7. For scholarship on itinerant exhibition into the 1930s, see Johnson, Main Street Movies; and Waller, “Robert Southard.” For scholarship on earlier periods, see “Lectures, Sound Effects, and the Itinerant Exhibition Model,” in Altman, Silent Film Sound, 133–56. See also Musser and Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures. 8. Ben Singer, “Early Home Cinema and the Edison Home Kinetoscope,” Film History 2, no. 1 (1988): 37. 9. A range of such declarations are documented in Singer, 40–42. 10. Singer documents some of these discussions into the teens; ibid. 11. Anke Medbold and Charles Tepperman report that the gauge was used well into the early 1930s in Canada. Some estimates indicate roughly ten thousand 28 mm projectors were in operation throughout North America when 16 mm was introduced in 1923. For more, see: Medbold and Tepperman, “Resurrecting the Lost History of 28mm film in North America,” Film History 15, no. 2 (2003): 137. 12. Even though the device was called a Home Kinetoscope, it was also broadly discussed as an aid to schools and learning. It was presented as “very simple, very compact and that its films are non-flammable.” “Edison Home Kinetoscope,” Talking Machine World 8, no. 5 (15 May 1912): 54. 13. Eastman Kodak had introduced nonflammable film in 1909, and by 1911, Pathé was able to produce its own nonflammable diacetate film. Medbold and Tepperman, 140. 14. See “The New Premier Pathescope,” Arts and Decoration, September 1919, 248. 15. Gregory Waller has surveyed the innumerable locations in which films were being shown in the year 1915, normally understood to mark the robust

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start to what became Hollywood classicism. See Waller, “Search and Re-Search: Digital Print Archives and the History of Multi-Sited Cinema,” in The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities, ed. Charles Acland and Eric Hoyt (Falmer, UK: REFRAME Books, 2016), 45–63; see also Waller, “The New Nontheatrical Cinema History.” 16. See, for example, Talking Machine World, August 15, 1914, 23; July 15, 1914, 2; and February 15, 1915, 30. Deep thanks to Louis Pelletier for generously sharing his material with me. These Pathéscope materials are also dealt with in more detail by Medbold and Tepperman. 17. Singer, “Early Home Cinema,” documents that Edison’s 22 mm gauge was essentially abandoned in 1915, 38. On 28 mm see Tepperman and Medbold. 18. This is especially true of 28 mm and 22 mm, which were marketed for home use and for small-group exhibition. While Pathé did market a 28 mm camera, there was no 22 mm camera forthcoming from Edison or its associates. A 9.5 mm camera emerged months before the 9.5 mm projector and was persistently in use for decades as both an amateur filmmaking system and a film watching system, particularly in Europe. On the specificities of the 9.5 gauge, see Anne Gourdet-Marès, “La caméra Pathé-Baby: Le cinéma amateur à l’âge de l’experimentation,” in L’Amateur en cinéma Un autre paradigme: Histoire, esthétique, marges and institutions, ed. Valérie Vignaux and Benoît Turquety (Paris: Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma, 2016), 75–93. 19. See Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); and Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 20. See Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931 (New York: Scribner, 1997). 21. S. L. Rothafel, “The Motion Picture Theatre of the Future and the Equipment Probably Required,” Transactions of SMPE 14 (May 1922), 100–103. 22. Ross Melnick, American Showman: Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908–1935 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 23. Rothafel, “The Motion Picture Theatre,”101. Rothafel made a very similar plea in the pages of Architectural Forum two years later: “What the Public Wants,” Architectural Forum 42, no. 6 (June 1925): 361–64. 24. Melnick, American Showman, 204. 25. William Paul notes that the Strand advertised a seating capacity of 3,500, but it likely sat 3,000 instead. When Movies Were Theater, 100. 26. Paul, When Movies Were Theater, 99. 27. See Ross Melnick, “Station R-O-X-Y: Roxy and the Radio,” Film History: An International Journal 17 (2005): 217–33; and Melnick, American Showman, 186. 28. As Kathryn Fuller-Seeley has shown, palaces had the effect of marking off distinctions between sophisticated, urban moviegoing and lesser, provincial

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forms in the hinterlands. A clear hierarchy had emerged that was often further secured by the association of particular kinds of films with particular venues. See At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). Paul Moore has demonstrated that another way theaters worked to craft an identity was to sidestep luxury and aim for timeliness and genre-based thrills. For instance, the wildly popular serial films of the teens that brokered in daring-do, melodrama, and wild stunts did not generally appear in palaces. Uniquely tied to the ephemeral and daily ideals of newspaper readership, serials resided in more affordable and workaday theaters, emphasizing less the glamor of “the show” and instead selling fun. See Paul Moore: “Everybody’s Going: City Newspapers and the Early Mass Market for Movies,” City and Community 4, no. 4 (December 2005): 339–57. 29. Paul, When Movies Were Theater, 96–97. 30. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 31. Gomery, Shared Pleasures, 60. 32. Gomery suggests this amounted to 75 percent of box office take. Ibid., 60. 33. For an overview of the SMPE’s first ten years, see Luci Marzola, “A Society Apart: The Early Years of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers,” Film History 28, no. 4 (December 2016): 1–28. 34. The characterization of the film industry as “horizontal” when seen through the lens of the SMPE is taken from Marzola’s work, first published as “A Society Apart.” For a longer view to its role in technological innovation, see Luci Marzola, “Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building the Studio System, 1915–1930” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2016). In this exceptional dissertation, Marzola argues that technology and its industries are a formative factor in understanding the American film industry from the teens forward, making the studio system, and by extension Hollywood, possible. For a specific focus on competition in film stock manufacture, see Luci Marzola, “Better Pictures through Chemistry: DuPont and the Fight for the Hollywood Stock Market,” The Velvet Light Trap 76 (Fall 2015): 3–18. 35. Courtland Smith from Pathé news wrote in 1932 that small portable projectors would allow for continued diversification and specialization, and “become as generally used as is the printed word.” Smith was particularly interested in rear-projection devices as they allowed projectors to repurpose any and all spaces for film presentation. Courtland Smith, “The Future of the Motion Pictures,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 19, no. 3 (September 1932): 294–96. 36. The SMPE was initially an association for professionals with expertise and vested interest in motion picture technology, which also included electrical engineers, who became particularly important for the development of

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sound and later television. The organization changed its name to the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers in 1950, indicating early on their relationship to changing technologies and institutions as distinct from the studios proper, which were at that time still figuring out how the film industry would ultimately be situated in relation to broadcasting. 37. See Crafton, The Talkies. 38. Bordwell et al., Classical Hollywood Cinema, 251. 39. See Marzola, “A Society Apart.” 40. David Noble charts the widespread integration of research and development departments within large American corporations throughout the early twentieth century. See. David F. Noble, American by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 41. Marzola notes that Kodak was a particularly strong player during the 1920s. See “Engineering a Society Apart: Cooperation and Competition Among East Coast Motion Picture Technology Manufacturers” in Engineering Hollywood, 39—88. 42. Ibid., 23. 43. Marzola, “A Society Apart,” 2. 44. Lloyd A. Jones, “Presidential Address,” Transactions of the SMPE (May 1924): 15–22, 16. 45. Ibid., 17. 46. See pamphlet issued by the Bureau of Fire Prevention, “Regulations for Construction and Use of Portable Motion Picture Booths,” City of New York, Fire Department, 1915, New York Public Library. Discussions and guidelines for portable projection booths can also be found in projection manuals of this era. The by-laws for New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, for instance, are laid out in, “Laws and Regulations Governing The Showing of Motion Pictures,” in James R. Cameron, Motion Picture Projection, 4th ed. (Woodmont, CT: Cameron Publishing, 1942), 1061–121. In New Jersey, portability was also a temporally bound concept. Any projection that lasted more than three nights in succession exceeded municipal definitions of a temporary show and hence eligibility for “portable” apparatuses (1069). In New York, the temporality was more liberal. “Portability” could entail daily showings for up to one month or not more than three times per week (1064). Clearly, here portability was about protecting a business model that favored permanence and the additional regulatory apparatus that accompanied it. Cameron’s projection manuals are also filled with interesting asides about various unconventional projection scenarios, including sound-triggered projection in shooting galleries. According to Cameron, a film projector and rolling paper screen was first installed in the basement of the Strand Theater in New York City. Films of running rabbits or birds in flight appeared on the screen in order to test the aim of a participant. The sound of the rifle triggered a control mechanism that stopped the projection and stilled the image. This book also included instruction on the use of projection in filmmaking and within all phases of studio operations (i.e., screen tests), and devotes a section to “Auto Drive-In Theaters,” also referred to as “open-air theaters.”

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47. See for example, “The New Premier Pathescope,” Arts and Decoration, September 1919, 248. 48. See Alexander F. Victor, “The Portable Projector: Its Present Status and Needs,” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 6 (April 1918): 29–32. 49. Ibid., 32. 50. Ibid., 30. 51. Ibid. 52. See “The 16mm Industry Comes of Age, 1912–1944”; and Victor, “The History and Origin of 16mm,” both printed in the Annual Report, Victor Animatograph Corporation, 1944, Victor Animatograph Corporation Records, The University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa, 11. 53. For a sophisticated discussion of these matters, see Jacobson, “Fire and Failure.” 54. This was true until 1917 when new safety standards were established for film shipping. 55. See for instance, Henry Anderson, “Fire Safety in the Motion Picture Industry,” Quarterly of the National Fire Protection Association 30, no. 1 (1936): 20–27. 56. For a contemporaneous and lively discussion of these things see: F. H. Richardson, “The Projection Room and Its Requirements,” Transactions of the SMPE (1918) (1918): 29–37. It is worth pointing out that debates about the projection room ran side by side with provocations for portability. It is also worth noting that Richardson was one of the most voluble spokespeople for projectionists. Not only was he a regular contributor to the debates hosted by the SMPE, he was also author of Richardson’s Handbook of Projection: The Blue Book of Projection, first printed by Chalmers in New York in 1927 with subsequent editions to follow. In the 1930 edition of this book, fire safety in the projection booth was a primary concern: F. H. Richardson, Richardson’s Handbook of Projection: The Blue Book of Projection (New York: Chalmers, 1930). 57. National electrical code cited in W. B. Cook, “Advantages in the Use of the New Standard Narrow Width, Slow-Burning Film for Portable Projectors,” Transactions of the SMPE (1918) 86–90, 97. Indeed, many organizations such as churches and schools continued to show 35 mm films throughout the 1930s. Henry Anderson reported to the National Fire Protection Association, on behalf of the film industry, that film exchanges required proof of projection permit (ensuring safety) before renting to any school, church, or lodge. The same report notes that film distributors had aided in the installation of 360 standard fire-resistive booths in nontheatrical institutions, which added to the 3,000 already approved for safe continued exhibition of film. Anderson, “Fire Safety,” 26. 58. See Grieveson, Policing Cinema, and Stamp, Movie Struck Girls. 59. The Pathéscope projector used 28 mm nonflammable film stock and was serviced with content by the Pathéscope Rental Library. This library serviced affluent homes as well as organizations such as schools, churches, clubs, and

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lodges, as well as spheres of agriculture, industry, and business. For a more thorough study of 28  mm, see Medbold and Tepperman, “Resurrecting the Lost History of 28 mm.” 60. Cook, “Advantages in the Use,” 89. 61. C. Francis Jenkins, “Special Report Nomenclature Committee,” Transactions of the SMPE (November 1921): 162. 62. W. E. Story, “Special Report on the Committee on Standards,” Transactions of the SMPE (November 1921): 163. 63. See the recommendation that official gauges be recognized as 35 mm, 28 mm, and 16 mm in “Report of Standards and Nomenclature Committee,” Transactions of the SMPE (May 1924): 236–48. 64. The foundational book on small-gauge filmmaking is Zimmerman’s Reel Families. See also Tepperman’s Amateur Cinema for a more recent consideration of this early history. 65. Concurrent with the new format’s release, duplicate copies from positive prints could be made, as could enlargements. “Amateur Motion Picture Outfit,” Motion Picture News, February 17, 1923, 860. 66. See, for instance, Susan Aasman, “The Introduction of Cine-Kodak: ‘The Long-Awaited Answer,’” in Exposing the Film Apparatus: The Film Archive as a Research Laboratory, ed. Giovanna Fossati and Annie Van Den Oever (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 119–30. 67. For a fascinating examination of Kodak’s business during World War II and the intricate relationships among film stock, chemistry, natural resources and geopolitics, see Lovejoy, “Celluloid Geopolitics.” 68. This is further discussed in chapters 2 and 3. 69. Kodascope Libraries was incorporated even before the new gauge was officially announced. See “New Companies Enter Industry in N.Y.,” Motion Picture News, February 3, 1923, 555. 70. From the system’s announcement through to 1924, it seems that it was initially sold as a complete “outfit” and that all components had to be purchased together. But this changed soon thereafter. By early 1926, projectors are plainly being advertised separately from cameras. See for instance “Eastman Introduces Model “C” of the Kodascope,” Educational Screen, May 1926, 305; “And Now the Kodascope C.” New York Times, April 6, 1926, 10; also the advertisement “Kodascope, Model B,” Amateur Movie Makers, December 1927, inside back cover. 71. See “Symposium on Portable Projectors,” Transactions of the SMPE (May 1923): 225–66. 72. C. E. K. Mees, “A New Substandard Film for Amateur Cinematography,” Transactions of the SMPE (May 1923): 252–56. 73. C. E. K. Mees, “The Cine Kodak and Kodascope,” Transactions of the SMPE (May 1923): 246–51. Mees identified himself as “Director of Research and Development” at Eastman Kodak. 74. The new Bell and Howell 16  mm camera and project were officially presented to the SMPE at their May 1924 meeting. See J. H. McNabb “The

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Filmo Automatic Cine-Camera and Cine-Projectors,” Transactions of SMPE (May 1924): 127–34. 75. Mees also outlined a special high-reflection screen that allowed for viewing at an angle, as well as a spring roller that allowed it to be easily collapsed and stored. The screen also came framed by a black border to help improve and delineate the projected image. Mees, “The Cine Kodak,” 250. 76. Ibid. Kodak simultaneously launched a related business under the name Kodascope Libraries, which became fully operational in 1925, designed to supply films to its new technological infrastructure. Pathé and eventually Bell and Howell launched film rental services for homes. For more on this, see Haidee Wasson, “The Reel of the Month Club: 16mm Projectors, Home Theatres and Film Libraries in the 1920s,” in Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of the Cinema, ed. Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes, and Robert C. Allen (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2008) 217–34. See also David Pierce, “Silent Movies and the Kodascope Libraries,” American Cinematographer, January 1989, 36–40. 77. C. Francis Jenkins, “The Discrola,” Transactions of the SMPE (May 1923): 234–37. 78. Ibid., 236. 79. For more on Charles Urban, see Luke McKernan, Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897–1925 (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2013). 80. Charles Urban, “The Spirograph,” Transactions of the SMPE (May 1923): 259. 81. Ibid., 263. 82. Ibid., 261. 83. Willard B. Cook, “Description to Accompany Demonstration of Pathéscope,” Transactions of the SMPE (May 1923), 266. 84. J. R. Mitchell, “The Beacon Portable Motion Picture Projector,” Transactions of the SMPE (May 1923): 225–32, 225–26. Mitchell’s Beacon projector weighed twenty-nine pounds. 85. Augustus R. DeTartas, “A Combined Motion Picture Camera and Projector,” Transactions of the SMPE (May 1923): 239. DeTartas offered up a camera-projector combination unit, which he claimed weighed six pounds. 86. Alexander F. Victor, “The Motion Picture: A Practical Feature of the Home,” Transactions of the SMPE (May 1923) 264–65. 87. Herbert C. McKay, “Future Developments in the Sixteen Millimeter Field,” Transactions of the SMPE 12, no. 6 (1928): 1115. 88. These hefty manuals were published for many years and provide interesting portals into the dynamic world of projection. See, for instance, Cameron, “16mm Projectors,” in Motion Picture Projection, 4th ed. (1928), 1013–50; and Cameron, Motion Picture Projection, 8th ed. (1942). 89. These regulations also addressed worker safety of various sorts, including protection from toxic fumes created by hot nitrate prints, and exposure to ultraviolet and infrared rays. The projection booth was a highly regulated

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element of the apparatus, with clear guidelines in place throughout the 1920s that stipulate the size, coverings (asbestos!), furniture (metal), openings, and ventilation requirements. Such by-laws also governed temporary, occasional projections in educational, and religious institutions or by organizations of “bona fide” social, scientific, political, or athletic clubs. See Cameron, “16mm Projectors.” Kodak and Bell and Howell devices are featured here. For the material on a range of projection devices for institutions and organizations beyond the theater, see Cameron, “Picture Projection: For Education, Business and the Home,” in Motion Picture Projection (1928), 407–20. In this chapter Cameron also provides advice on the challenges of itinerance and the need for electrical power. As late as 1928, he outlines the common use of small generators that can be attached to a car engine, or the use of stand-alone gasoline-operated generators as were common in rural areas, 416. 90. C. S. Gillette, “Testing Motion Picture Machines for the Naval Service,” Transactions of the SMPE (May 1923): 126–36. 91. See for instance, Harry Levey, “Industrial Mechanigraphs,” Transactions of the SMPE (1921): 55–64; and in the same issue, C. P Watson, “Analysis of Motion,” 65. See also, Raymond S. Peck, “The Use of Motion Pictures for Governmental Purposes,” Transactions of the SMPE 26 (November 1926): 55; R. Evans, “The Sound Film Program of the United States Department of Agriculture,” Journal of the SMPE 21, no. 3 (September 1933): 224–29; and C. M. Koon, Department of Interior, Office of Education, “Is the Federal Government Interested in Educational Films,” Journal of the SMPE 26, no. 3 (August 1936): 204–9; and in the same issue see J. M. Albert, “The Use of Motion Pictures in Human Power Measurement,” 275–78, on the use of 8 mm in time-motion studies into the 1930s. For business films, see: Journal of the SMPE 27, no. 4 (October 1930). In particular, see W. F. Kruse, “The Business Screen—Some Demands Made by and upon It,” 431–39. 92. See Zimmerman, Reel Families. Brian Winston seems particularly persuaded that small-gauge technologies were designed specially for amateur cinematography and that its failure to develop as a vibrant realm of cultural activity held back small gauges and systems. Brian Winston, Technologies of the Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 61. Winston gives no consideration to the expense of 16 mm equipment, the effect of the transition to sound during the decade, or the socioeconomic conditions that characterized the bulk of the 1930s and into the war. 93. Such articles appeared regularly. See Ernest L Crandall, “The Place of the Motion Picture in Education,” Transactions of the SMPE (May 1923): 29. See also F. N. Freeman, “The Use of Motion Pictures in Education,” Transactions of the SMPE (April 1925): 66–68. Freeman spends a good deal of time discussing the importance of control over film speed, including slowing down, speeding up and stilling images. See A. Shapiro, “Motion Pictures in Education,” Journal of the SMPE 23 (October 1939): 434–43. For motion pictures in science, see: Heinz Rosenberger, “Micro-Cinema in Medical Research,” Transactions of the SMPE (September 1927): 750.

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94. Peck, “Use of Pictures.”. 95. Transactions of the SMPE, “Report of Progress Committee, 1926–27,” (July 1927): 7–20. See also E. I. Sponable, “Movietone Field Projection Outfit,” Transactions of the SMPE (1928): 1180. Sponable eventually worked for Fox and was active in experimenting on sound film. 96. See McKay, “Future Developments in the Sixteen Millimeter Field.” 97. This committee’s early reports were published in the society’s journal. See for instance “Report of the Non-Theatrical Equipment Committee,” Journal of the SMPE 19, no. 2 (August 1932): 199; and “Report of the NonTheatrical Equipment Committee,” 21, no. 1 (July 1933): 16–20. 98. For select examples of particularly interesting reports, see “Progress in the Motion Picture Industry,” Transactions of the SMPE (April 1927): 5–105. These reports grew longer during the 1920s and reflect the significantly growing field. See for instance “Report of the Progress Committee,” Transactions of the SMPE 31, no. 37 (1929): 66–105. See also J. L. Boon, “Some Unusual Adaptations of 16-mm Equipment for Special Purposes,” Transactions of the SMPE 31, no. 4 (October 1938): 386–92. 99. But one example of small screen devices can be found in W. R. Daniel, “The Pathex Camera and Projector,” Transactions of the SMPE (March 1926): 147–48. The Pathex was “a little machine 12½ inches high by 7½ inches wide at its widest part, and is capable of accommodating 60 feet, or two reels, of film from which it will throw a picture 30 by 40 inches at a distance of 12 feet” (147). The companion camera could record thirty feet of film at a time. On calls for adaptability, see W.  W. Kincaid, “Requirements of the Educational and NonTheatrical Entertainment Field,” Transactions of the SMPE (May 1924): 111–13. 100. While the first catalog for the Kodascope Library service appeared in 1925, it was clearly in operation well before that. Use of its films was plainly mentioned in May of 1924 when J. H. McNabb introduced the complementary Bell and Howell 16 mm camera and projector. See McNabb, “The Filmo Automatic Cine-Camera. In a cunning move, Kodak hired Willard Cook, formerly of Pathéscope, to build their Kodascope Library. It is also worth noting that before the 16 mm gauge, and subsequent to its introduction, Kodak supplied 28 mm film stock to Pathé for their competing system, and at this point was the primary supplier of film stock to Hollywood. Kodak was plainly in the business of selling celluloid and had no special commitment to amateurism or hobbyism per se. The 16 mm width was also seen as having added control over the use of less expensive flammable 35 mm film stock, as it could not be easily split in two and adapted to the smaller 16 mm devices. For an overview of Kodascope Libraries, see Pierce, “Silent Movies and the Kodascope Libraries.” And, for a broader contextual view of the development of film rental libraries during this period, see Wasson, “The Reel of the Month Club.” 101. John Beardslee Carrigan, “Hollywood and the 16mm Film,” Transactions of the SMPE (April 1928): 33–40. Statistic on the number of libraries in 1928 comes from Pierce, “Silent Movies and the Kodascope Libraries,” 38. Pathé continued to issue films in 9.5 mm and 16 mm.

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102. For a more detailed overview of home film libraries and Hollywood in the 1920s, see Wasson, “Electric Homes! Automatic Movies!” 103. Carrigan, “Hollywood and the 16mm Film.” 104. See Wasson, “Electric Homes! Automatic Movies!” 105. Carrigan, “Hollywood and the 16mm Film, 39. 106. See Zimmerman, Reel Families, esp. chapter 3, “Professional Results with Amateur Ease, 1923–1940.” 107. W. Lewin, “Photoplay Appreciation in Nation’s Schools,” Journal of the SMPE 21, no. 1 (July 1933): 9–15. 108. L. I. Monosson, “The Soviet Cinematography,” Journal of the SMPE (October 1930): 512. Records of the SMPE indicate that Eisenstein attended a banquet in New York City with members of the SMPE in October of 1930. See, “Banquet Speeches,” Journal of the SMPE (February 1931): 223–38. 109. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Dynamic Square,” in Film Essays and a Lecture, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Praeger, 1970), 48–65. According to Leyda this speech was delivered to the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. 110. John Grierson, “Better Popular Pictures,” Transactions of the SMPE (April 1927): 227–40. 111. For more on Grierson’s impact around the world, see Zoë Druick and Deane Williams, eds., The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary’s International Movement (London: British Film Institute, 2014). 112. Symon Gould, “The Little Theater Movement in the Cinema,” Transactions of the SMPE (January 1927): 58. Gould later founded the American Vegetarian Party in 1948. 113. R. W. Winton, “A Non-Theatrical, International Service Organization— The Amateur Cinema League,” Journal of the SMPE (August 1936): 210–17. 114. See Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back. For the United States, the best overview of the interwar period remains Horak’s Lovers of Cinema. For an examination of the importance of 16  mm for early art film circuits, see Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). For a compelling examination of amateur cinema and its complex imbrication with politics and experiment beyond the United States, see Salazkina and Fibla, eds., Global Perspectives. See also Fibla, A Pedagogical Impulse: Noncommercial Film Cultures in Spain (1931–1936) (PhD thesis, Concordia University, 2018). British publications also echoed calls for portable projectors, sometimes called “non-standard” film. See Norman Wilson, “The Sub-standard Film,” Cinema Quarterly 2, no. 1 (1933): 2–3. Only a few years later, World Film News, which absorbed Cinema Quarterly, similarly declared: “The substandard libraries are going to be the repertory supply of the future.” See “Wealth of the Home Libraries,” World Film News and Television Progress 1, no. 5 (1936): 33. 115. Some of these debates are rehearsed in the journal Close Up in the late 1920s. See Bryher, “How Would I Start a Film Club,” in Close Up: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 290–93 and “What Can I Do?” in

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Donald, Friedberg, and Marcus, Close Up, 286–89. For a suggestive discussion of the “little projector” and the feminist undercurrents of the journal Close Up, see Anne Friedberg, “And I Myself,” 92. 116. On Moholy-Nagy’s film experiments, see Noam Elcott, “Rooms of our Time: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and the Stillbirth of Multi-media Museums,” in Screen/Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art, ed. Tamara Trodd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011): 25–52. See also Moholy-Nagy Painting, Photography, Film, trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969). 117. For the best survey of this period in the United States, see Horak, Lovers of Cinema.

Chapter Two. Spectacular Portability 1. For more on the debut of television, see Ron Becker, “‘Hear-and-See Radio’ in the World of Tomorrow: RCA and the Presentation of Television at the World’s Fair, 1939–1940,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television 21, no. 4 (2001): 361–78. Andreas Fickers, “Presenting the ‘Window on the World’ to the World. Competing Narratives of the Presentation of Television at the World’s Fairs in Paris (1937) and New York (1939),” Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television 28, no. 3 (2008): 291–310. 2. For more on the Westinghouse exhibit, see The Westinghouse Exhibit at the World’s Fair of 1940 in New York (Westinghouse, 1940) Box 1858, File 5, New York World’s Fair 1939–40 Collection, Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library. 3. The wonders of electricity and of electrically facilitated ideas of expanded embodiment seem to have thrilled fairgoers. For more such examples see New York Museum of Science and Industry, Exhibition Techniques: A Summary of Exhibition Practice, Based on Surveys Conducted at the New York and San Francisco World’s Fairs of 1939 (New York: New York Museum of Science and Industry, 1940). 4. Becker, “Hear-and-See Radio,” 369. 5. The New York World’s Fair actually ran for six months, from May to October, in 1939, and again in 1940. 6. Reports vary on how many projectors of what type were in operation at the fair. The magazine Business Screen estimated that 130 portable projectors operated throughout the fairgrounds. See “The World’s Fair Survey of Motion Pictures and Slidefilms at the Fairs,” Business Screen 2, no. 1 (1939): 21–25, quoted in Claude Collins, “Introduction,” in Films Exhibited at the World’s Fair 1939: A Survey (1940), NY World’s Fair Collection, Box 398, File 10. Other sources suggest a far more striking figure of 10:1, which would indicate several hundreds of projectors and would make portable machines the dominant type of projector at the fair by outsized margins. See “Exhibitors Projection Committee, New York World’s Fair 1939” (17 March 1939) NY World’s Fair Collection, Box 309, File 11.

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7. This is an ever-expanding area. Particularly important publications include Hediger and Vonderau’s collection Films That Work; Acland and Wasson, eds. Useful Cinema; and Orgeron, Orgeron, and Streible, eds. Learning with the Lights Off. See also Florin, de Klerk, and Vonderau, eds., Films That Sell. 8. This argument has been more fully elaborated in my previous essays. See Haidee Wasson, “The Protocols of Portability” Film History 25, nos. 1–2 (2013): 236–47; and “The Other Small Screen: Moving Images at New York’s World Fair, 1939,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 21, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 81–103. 9. See for instance, Beatriz Colomina, “Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture,” Grey Room 2 (Winter 2001): 5–29; Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Janine Marchessault, “Multi-Screens and Future Cinema: The Labyrinth Project at Expo ’67” in Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema, ed. Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); and Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 10. The turn to industrial design is partly inspired by Nieland’s work on Charles and Ray Eames and their use of film as an instrument of design. See Nieland, Happiness by Design. 11. These insights are laid out in Crafton, The Talkies. See also Steven Wurtzler, Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 12. For a more thorough accounting of these crucial changes see Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations. 13. See Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity; Melnick, American Showman. 14. For more on theatrical trends during this era, see Jocelyn SzczepaniakGillece, The Optical Vacuum: Spectatorship and Modernized American Theatre Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). See also Larry May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way, particularly the chapter: “Utopia on Main Street: Modern Theaters and the “New” Audiences” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 101–38. 15. For examples of the growing amount of work in this area see, for instance, Lee Grieveson, “The Work of Film in the Age of Fordist Mechanization,” Cinema Journal 51, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 25–51; Sara Sullivan, “Corporate Discourses of Sponsored Films of Steel Production in the United States, 1936–1956,” Velvet Light Trap 72 (Fall 2013): 33–43; Greg Waller, “Free Talking Picture—Every Farmer Is Welcome: Non-theatrical Film and Everyday Life in Rural America during the 1930s,” in Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema, ed. Richard Maltby, Robert C. Allen, and Melvyn Stokes (Exeter, UK: Exeter University Press, 2007), 248–72; and Greg Waller, “International Harvester, Business Screen, and the History of Advertising Film,” in Florin, de Klerk and Vonderau, Films That Sell. See also Paul

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Monticone, “‘Useful Cinema,’ of What Use? Assessing the Role of Motion Pictures in the Largest Public Relations Campaign of the 1920s,” Cinema Journal 54, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 74–99. 16. See Charles Musser, “Early Advertising Film and Promotional Films, 1893–1900: Edison Motion Pictures as a Case Study,” in Florin, de Klerk and Vonderau, Films That Sell, 83–92. 17. Tom Gunning, “The World as Object Lesson: Cinema Audiences, Visual Culture and the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904,” Film History 6, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 422–44. See also Charles Musser, “The Travel Genre in 1903–04: Moving towards Fictional Narrative,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1990). See also Vanessa Toulmin, “Telling the Tale: The Story of the Fairground Bioscope Shows and the Showman who Operated Them,” Film History 6, no. 2 (1994): 219–37. For the importance of visual culture in the historiography of cinema see Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz’s collection, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). For coverage of European fairs see Martin Loiperdinger, ed., “Travelling Cinema in Europe,” special issue: Kintop 10 (2008). For in depth examination of the German context, see Michael Cowan, “Taking It to the Street: Screening the Advertising Film in the Weimar Republic,” Screen 54, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 463–79; and his important book, Walter Ruttman and the Cinema of Multiplicity. 18. Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations. 19. For more on this exceptional event, see Monika Kin Gagnon and Janine Marchessault’s edited collection, Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (Montreal: McGill-Queens, 2014). The literature on fairs and film is growing rapidly. Michael Cowan has recently written about German industrial fairs and their use of films; see: “From the Astonished Spectator to the Spectator in Movement: Exhibition Advertisements in 1920s Germany and Austria,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 23, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 2–29. For a focused examination of film at the Brussels World Fair, which merged industry interests with Cold War dynamics, see Sarah Nilsen, Projecting America, 1958: Film and Cultural Diplomacy at the Brussels World’s Fair (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011). For examination of Britain’s post-WWII fair and films, see Janine Marchessault, “T is for Telekinema: Projecting Future Worlds at the Festival of Britain,” in Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopia, Ecologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 87–126. 20. For a recent and fulsome exploration of immersion and exhibition techniques, see Turner, The Democratic Surround. 21. For considerations of the relationship between the Eameses and IBM as well as the State Department, see Nieland, Happiness by Design. 22. See for instance: Elspeth H. Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). See also David Nye, Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890–1930 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). On the targeted use of film to create particular affects

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whether they be emotional, belief-based, or action-oriented, see Kitt Hughes, “‘For Pete’s Sake, I’m Not Trying to Entertain These People’: Film and Franchising at International Harvester,” Film History 27, no. 3 (2015): 41–72. 23. Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 24. For more on this see Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul; and William L. Bird Jr., “Better Living”: Advertising, Media, and the New Vocabulary of Business Leadership, 1935–1955 (Evanston. IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999). 25. See William L. Bird Jr., “Enterprise and Meaning: Sponsored Film, 1939–1941,” History Today 39 (December 1989): 24–30; and “Better Living.” See also Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul. 26. On Edison’s early use of film see Kristen Whissel, Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology and Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). On Ford Motor Company’s early use of film, see Grieveson, “The Work of Film.” Grieveson cites internal Ford documents that suggest the reach of Ford films was significant, claiming that they appeared in four thousand movie theaters in the 1920s, or to one-seventh of the weekly film audience. Ford further proclaimed that its films had been seen by sixty million people worldwide by 1924 (28). Monticone documents limited use of cinema in public relations within the electrical utility industry during the 1920s. See “‘Useful Cinema,’ of What Use?” Stephen Groening maps the gendered use of training films by Western Union in the 1920s in “We Can See Ourselves as Others See Us: Women Workers and Western Union’s Training Films in the 1920s,” in Useful Cinema, 34–58. For more on the role of International Harvester in the 1930s, see Waller, “Free Talking Picture.” International Harvester (IH) began using motion pictures in 1910, largely as educational publicity films, detailing new methods of farming. Training films, educational films, and entertainment films circulated broadly from the 1920s well into midcentury. Free farm films, of which the IH films were a part, constituted a common mode of film viewing for rural Americans in the 1930s, according to Waller. 27. Robert A. Reiser, “A History of Instructional Design and Technology: Part 1,” Educational Technology Research and Development 49, no. 1 (2001): 53–64; and “A History of Instructional Design and Technology: Part II,” Educational Technology Research and Development 49, no. 2 (2001): 57–67. 28. See for instance “Momentum” [DeVry Advertisement] Business Screen 1, no. 5 (1938), 29. 29. See S. H. Walker and Paul Sklar, Business Finds Its Voice: Management’s Effort to Sell the Business Idea to the Public (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938). This book was a reprint of a series of articles published in Harper’s Magazine in 1938. 30. Indeed, advocates of the use of popular media forms for public relations purposes were highly aware of the ways in which noncommercial circuits for 16 mm film were developing, rightly citing the US Bureau of Mines, the

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American Museum of Natural History, and the YMCA as leading examples of institutions that were successfully shaping this new film circuit. See Walker and Sklar, Business Finds Its Voice. 31. For an overview of the car industry during this period see Albert Chandler Giant Enterprise: Ford, General Motors and the Automobile Industry (New York: Harcourt, 1964). 32. Walker and Sklar, Business Finds Its Voice, 17. For instance, DuPont praised the role of chemistry in daily life; steel manufacturers facilitated safe school buses and strong bridges. The role of film is addressed directly in chapters 6, 7, and 8. Thanks to Rick Prelinger, who kindly expedited a digital scan of this booklet. 33. Ibid., 43. For more on Jam Handy see Rick Prelinger, “Smoothing the Contours of Didacticism: Jam Handy and His Organization,” in Orgeron, Orgeron, and Streible, Learning with the Lights Off, 338–55. In this article, Prelinger focuses on Henry Jamison Handy, the company’s founder, tracing his contribution to filmmaking. The essay contains valuable insights into Handy’s blend of industrial, advertising, and educational languages within film. It also contains important information about the organization itself. Jam Handy was the largest industrial filmmaker throughout midcentury, with an estimated seven thousand motion pictures in its catalog and roughly one hundred thousand slide films (342). Prelinger includes a tale of Handy’s upbringing, which involved extensive time spent at the Chicago World’s Fair Columbian Exhibition, where his father worked on exhibition publicity. Prelinger notes that Handy was taken with the modes of exhibition and display, learning about the world by flashing light, sounds, color, and showmanship, which likely shaped his later films (34). See also Brian Oakes, “Building Films for Business: Jamison Handy and the Industrial Animation of the Jam Handy Organization,” Film History 22, no. 1 (2010): 95–107. 34. Walker and Sklar, Business Finds Its Voice, 44. Greg Waller has shown that tractor dealers were also active users of films, playing important roles in rural film circuits. See “Free Talking Picture” and “International Harvester.”  35. Our American Crossroads (General Motors, 1940). This film documents the diorama that was part of the Caravan of Progress, which itself illustrates the difference between an American town before cars and then afterward. The voiceover for the film is a folksy older man narrating the story of Pleasant Corners. This film can be viewed online at GM Heritage Center Videos, https://www.gmheritagecenter.com/videos/1940/Our_American_Crossroads .html, and on the Internet Archive. Here research, science, and industry heroically prepare a prosperous path to the future. 36. For a sizable listing of Jam Handy films, see “Jam Handy Organization Production Log 1936–68,” Internet Archive, last accessed December 8, 2016, https://archive.org/stream/JHOProdLog3/JHO_Prod_Log_1_djvu.txt. 37. All statistics drawn from Walker and Sklar, Business Finds Its Voice, chapter 6. 38. See Rogers, On the Screen, in particular, “Mobility,” 161–68.

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39. Grieveson, “The Work of Film.” 40. Roland Marchand “The Designers Go to the Fair II: Norman Bel Geddes, the General Motors ‘Futurama,’ and the Visit to the Factory Transformed,” Design Issues 8, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 29. Initially budgeted at $2 million, the GM pavilion eventually cost over $7 million, which is roughly equal to $120,540,000 in 2016 (23). This dollar conversion was completed using Bureau of Labor Statistics and government data tracking Consumer Price Index over the last century. http://www.bls.gov/cpi/home.htm. 41. Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Hope and Ashes: The Birth of Modern Times 1929–1939 (New York: The Free Press, 1986), 190. 42. See Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003), particularly chapters 9, 10, and 11. 43. For more on this see Robert Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-ofProgress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); On the history of eugenics and the fair, see Christina Cogdell, “The Futurama Recontextualized: Norman Bel Geddes’s Eugenic ‘World of Tomorrow,’” American Quarterly 52, no. 2 (June 2000): 193–245; and Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 44. Roland Marchand, “Corporate Imagery and Popular Education: World’s Fairs and Expositions in the United States, 1893–1940,” in Consumption and American Culture, ed. David Nye and Carl Pederson (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1991), 18–33. 45. The trend toward active demonstration and dynamic illustration of products as opposed to static display is well-documented in New York Museum of Science and Industry, Exhibition Techniques, 21. 46. Donald Deskey, “Industrial Showmanship,” Business Screen, 1, no. 2 (1938): 17. 47. For a closer study of Teague’s role at the fair, see Roland Marchand, “The Designers Go to the Fair: Walter Dorwin Teague and the Professionalization of Corporate Industrial Exhibits, 1933–1940” Design Issues 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 4–17. For a focus on Bel Geddes, see Marchand “The Designers Go the Fair II.” Raymond Loewy, a French-born, American industrial designer, recognized by Time Magazine in 1949 (cover), is also interesting in this context. He worked for Shell, Exxon, Trans World Airlines, and designed British Petroleum logos, Coca-Cola Vending machines, Lucky Strike packages, Studebakers, various railroad cars, airplanes, department displays (Macy’s, Wanamaker’s, and Saks), and also did fashion illustration for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. “Designers go to the Fair II,” 23. 48. Rydell, World of Fairs, 127. 49. Ibid. 50. “Report of the Committee on Non-Theatrical Equipment,” Journal of the SMPE 24, no. 1 (January 1935): 23–26. For more on the history of sponsored films see: Daniel J. Perkins, “The Sponsored Film: A New Dimension in American Film Research?” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

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2, no. 2 (1982): 133–40, and “Sponsored Business Films: An Overview, 1895– 1955,” Film Reader 6 (1985): 125–32. 51. “Report of the Committee on Non-Theatrical Equipment,” (January 1935), 28. 52. Ibid., 23–24. 53. Of the roughly one hundred 16 mm projectors in use on the grounds, sixty-one of them were silent, nineteen used the recent sound-on-film technology and eleven used the soon-to-be-obsolete sound-on-disk models. Seventeen were manually operated and seventy-four were in automatic and continuous use. “Report of the Committee on Non-Theatrical Equipment” (January 1935). See also “A Survey on the Use of Films at Recent Expositions,” Business Screen 1, no. 2 (1938): 23. Bell & Howell conducted this survey sharing its information with Business Screen. 54. Business Screen, “A Survey on the Use of Films,” 24. 55. For more on the San Francisco Fair see: “The Films at the Golden Gate Fair,” Business Screen 2, no. 1 (1939): 22. 56. See for instance Walker and Sklar, Business Finds Its Voice, 42, claiming that five American advertising agencies opened up film branches by 1938. See also: “The ABC’s of Agency Film Activities,” Business Screen 1, no. 6 (1939): 18. For information about Jam Handy, see Rick Prelinger, “Eccentricity, Education and the Evolution of Corporate Speech: Jam Handy and His Organization,” in Hediger and Vonderau, Films That Work, 211–20. 57. “Movies-1,” press release (March 13, 1939), NY World’s Fair Collection, Box 398, File 7, p. 7. 58. Grover Whalen, “New Fields for Films at New York’s Fair,” Business Screen 1, no. 2 (1938): 15. 59. While a few Hollywood films were shot on-site, using the fair as backdrop, Hollywood otherwise opted to stay away from the fair’s exhibition venues in what seems like a concession to New York–area exhibitors. Its main contribution to the fair, aside from ample newsreel coverage, was to supply an anthology film, whose assembly was overseen by Cecil B. DeMille. For more on this see: Sara Beth Levy, “Land of Liberty in the World of Tomorrow,” Film History 18, no. 4 (2006): 440–58. 60. See for example, a three-page memo by Claude Collins to Fox Movietone, Hearst Metrotone, Paramount, Pathé, and Universal detailing a preview celebration at the fair. “To All Newsreel Editors” (April 29, 1938), NY World’s Fair Collection, Box 1983; File 2. 61. Collins, “Fair Movies,” 18. 62. Ibid. 63. “Letter” to George Hammond from Claude Collins (May 27, 1940), NY World’s Fair Collection, Box 1983; File 1, p. 2. 64. Ibid. 65. See “World’s Fair Films,” Film News 1, no. 7 (July 1940): 8. 66. See for instance Howard Barnes, “The Screen: The Moving Picture’s Part in the World’s Fair,” New York Herald Tribune, May 28, 1938. In this

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article, Barnes alerts readers to the fair’s elaborate offerings despite Hollywood’s absence, indicating that “the cinema is extensively represented” in the World of Tomorrow. For Barnes this included televised “movies” in the GE exhibition, the puppet film “Pete-Roleum,” and the “remarkable repertory of old and new Soviet films showing in the handsome motion picture theatre of the U.S.S.R. pavilion.” 67. In an exception to Hollywood’s generally tepid relationship to fairs, the 1939 film Charlie Chan at the Fair featured footage of the San Francisco Fair, giving one of the relatively rare Hollywood glimpses of these events. 68. For more on this film, see Levy, “Land of Liberty.” 69. Collins, “Introduction,” in Films Exhibited at the World’s Fair 1939: A Survey, Newsreel and Film Department, New York World’s Fair 1940 Inc., NY World’s Fair Collection, Box 398, File 1. 70. Richard Griffith cataloged and reviewed over five hundred films for the American Film Center in 1939. See Richard Griffith, “Films at the Fair,” Films: A Quarterly Discussion and Analysis 1 (November 1939), reprinted by Arno Press, 1968. 71. For more on this, see Haidee Wasson, “Industrial Magic and Light: 3D at the World’s Fair,” Public: 3D Cinema and Beyond 47 (Fall 2013): 123–31. 72. The use of films at the fair drew the attention of Carlos E. Cummings, who, in addition to being director of the Buffalo Museum of Science in 1939, was also commissioned by David Stevens, director of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, to conduct a study from the viewpoint of museum exhibition of the two World’s Fairs of 1939 in San Francisco and New York. Stevens’s interest in the fair yielded two volumes, one entitled Exhibition Techniques, and the other, Carlos Emmons Cummings, East Is East, West Is West (Buffalo, NY: Buffalo Museum of Science, 1940). The latter of these discusses in a rambling fashion all manner of exhibition techniques used at the fairs, and considers them in relation to how the museum might adapt them to its purposes. Cummings takes special notice of the use of film at the fairs. 73. Fordyce Tuttle, “Automatic Slide Projectors for the New York World’s Fair,” Journal of the SMPE 34 (March 1940): 265–71. The Kodak screen was matched by an exhibit in the Production and Distribution Exhibition, located in the Consumer’s Building, where seven synchronized motion picture projectors displayed an eight-minute film on a ten-foot-high and one-hundred-foot-wide screen, billed as the “widest movie screen ever built.” See “Films at the Fair,” Business Screen 1, no. 7 (1939): 37. 74. New York Museum of Science and Industry, Exhibition Techniques, 56. The Kodak Pavilion was not the only one with multiple projectors used to create the effect of motion. Exhibition Techniques, the report based on the fair, indicates that other such exhibits used grouped projectors in order to show dynamic change within and across illustrated subjects. One involved a curved wall that displayed images projected from at least five projectors, each showing images that projected onto a designated area of the wall with a label that grouped all images into a single category. Also, a model of a transparent woman

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was used in conjunction with rear-projection techniques, in order to conceal the apparatus and to seamlessly show biological change of internal organs, 59. 75. Tuttle, “Automatic Slide Projectors.” Notably bright colors featured prominently in many exhibits at the fair, with 40 percent of them employing them in some way. Technicolor also featured prominently among the many films shown, particularly those that were animated, echoing but also furthering the color revolution underway in mainstream commercial cinema. 76. For a detailed discussion of this see Rogers, On the Screen, in particular, “Synchronized Fields,” 135–39. 77. It is unclear from available sources what precise technology Waller used in his final installations of the Perisphere. For more on this, see Fred Waller, “The Archeology of Cinerama,” Film History 5, no. 3 (1993): 239–97. 78. For more on the expanded uses of film at the fair, see Haidee Wasson: “Selling Machines: Portable Projectors and Advertising at the World’s Fair,” in Florin, de Klerk, and Vonderau, Films That Sell, 54–70; and Wasson, “The Other Small Screen.” 79. Alice Goldfarb-Marquis, “The World of Tomorrow: Flushing Meadows, 1939,” in Hopes and Ashes: The Birth of Modern Times (New York: The Free Press, 1986), 197. 80. Grieveson, “The Work of Film.” Ford’s deep investments in film stretched forward in time to include the donation of ten mobile units in 1942 to the United Service Organizations as part of its “traveling clubs.” These units held a library of 16 mm sound films with projector and screen. The films also shared space in the unit with books, classical records, hot coffee, and snacks. “Ford Gives Mobile Units to US,” Motion Picture Herald, March 28, 1942, 52. 81. For the most thorough examination of Bel Geddes’s relationship to film, including his familiarity with the ideas of Sergei Eisenstein, see Ed Dimendberg, “The Will to Motorization: Cinema, Highways and Modernity,” October 73 (Summer 1995): 90–137. Bel Geddes also experimented with microphotography and high-speed filmmaking, as befitting his interest in scale. His films are collected along with his papers at the University of Texas. Designers working with film was not unusual, particularly as filmmaking became less expensive and practical beyond the professional film industry throughout midcentury. The work of Charles and Ray Eames provides a well-known case. 82. For scholarship on the modernist theater designs of Frederick Kiesler, see Laura McGuire, “A Movie House in Space and Time: Frederick Kiesler’s Film Arts Guild Cinema, New York, 1929,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 14, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 2007): 45–78. For an examination of Benjamin Schlanger’s theater designs see Szczepaniak-Gillece, The Optical Vacuum. For more on Bel Geddes’s relationship to theater design, see Laura McGuire, “Theaters,” in Norman Bel Geddes Designs America, ed. Donald Albrecht (New York: Abram, 2012), 173–83. 83. For a general overview of Bel Geddes’s contributions, see Albrecht, “Introduction,” in Norman Bel Geddes Designs America, 10–39. The reference to “architecture in motion” is on page 26 of this essay.

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84. For a technical description of the Futurama exhibit, see Schuyler Van Duyne “Talking Train Tour, World’s Fair Exhibit,” Popular Science, July 1939, 102–5. 85. For more on the relationship of Bel Geddes, Futurama, and the immanent building of the interstate highway system, see Paul Mason Fotsch, “The Building of a Superhighway Future at the New York World’s Fair,” Cultural Critique 48 (Spring 2001): 64–97. 86. See for instance “Futurama,” fair pamphlet, General Motors, 1939, World’s Fair Collection, Prelinger Library, San Francisco. 87. All films shown by GM in the fair’s first year were: A Coach for Cinderella, 35 mm and 16 mm sound, 10 minutes (Jam Handy, 1937); We Drivers, 35 and 16 mm sound, 10 minutes (Jam Handy); Modes and Motors, 35 mm and 16 mm, sound, 10 minutes (Jam Handy) (a film about industrial design); Color Harmony, 35 mm and 16 mm, 10 minutes (Jam Handy); Heritage of the Years, 35  mm and 16  mm, sound, 10 minutes (Wilding Picture Productions); King Cotton, 35 mm and 16 mm, sound, 10 minutes (Jam Handy); Quiet, Please! 35 mm and 16 mm sound, 10 minutes (Jam Handy) Jumping Beans, 35 mm and 16 mm sound, 10 minutes (Jam Handy); Nicky Nome Rides Again, 35 mm and 16 mm sound, 10 minutes (Jam Handy). Dates are difficult to find for these films, but it is safe to assume that they were all made in the second half of the 1930s. 88. New York Museum of Science and Industry, Exhibition Techniques, 15. 89. Walker and Sklar, Business Finds Its Voice. 90. Marchand, “The Designers Go the Fair II.” 91. For more on this see: Griffith “Films of the World’s Fair, 1939.” This was a report that Griffith wrote for the recently established American Film Center. 92. The score was written for the film by George Steiner and Phillip Sheib. 93. Business Screen, “The World’s Fair Survey of Motion Pictures.” 94. In its first year the film was in black and white. In 1940, a Technicolor version of the film was produced and the title changed to New Dimensions. In 1953, RKO bought the rights to the film and rereleased it as part of the well-known 3D cycle of that decade. Now you can find it in bits and pieces on YouTube. 95. See Business Screen, “The World’s Fair Survey of Motion Pictures,” quoted in Collins, “Introduction,” Films Exhibited. See also “Exhibitors Projection Committee, New York World’s Fair 1939” (March 17, 1939), NY World’s Fair Collection, Box 309, File 11. 96. Collins, “Introduction,” Films Exhibited. 97. Business Screen, “The World’s Fair Survey of Motion Pictures.” 98. Press release “Movies-1,” March 13, 1939, NY World’s Fair Collection Box 398; File 7, p. 7. 99. Projection on ceilings and under water at the fair is discussed in Cummings, East Is East. For examples of unrealized proposals for screen experimentation, consult the New York World’s Fair 1939–40 Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

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100. Cummings, East Is East, 258. Old American films starring Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Fatty Arbuckle, and Lon Chaney played daily in the Amusement Area of the fair in a one-hour show in a small theater with forty-eight seats. Admission was charged. Collins, “Introduction,” Films Exhibited, 12. 101. Gilbert Rohde, “Films Rediscovered,” Business Screen 1 (1938): 1. 102. See, for instance, DeVry Corporation Advertisement, Business Screen, “Momentum,” 29. 103. “Flolite,” Business Screen no. 1 (1938): 8. 104. Ibid. 105. Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London: Routledge 1990); Cowan, Walter Ruttman. 106. Andrea Kelley, “‘A Revolution in the Atmosphere’: The Dynamics of Site and Screen in 1940s Soundies,” Cinema Journal 54, no. 2 (Winter 2015): 72–93; and Kelley, Soundies. 107. During the 1930s, the SMPE established a “Projection Screens Committee” and began publishing its report regularly in the association’s journal in September 1931. For information about such screens, see, for instance, “Report of the Projection Screens Committee,” Journal of the SMPE (February 1932): 248–49. 108. For more on this see Griffith “Films at the World’s Fair.” 109. See also Aitken, Film and Reform. 110. For more on the development of rear-projection systems see Wasson, “The Other Small Screen.” 111. “The Eastman Business Kodascope,” Journal of SMPE (September 1928): 1175. 112. Such translucent screens were widely used by the US Navy on ships that needed to maximize viewing space deckside, and so arranged sailors on both sides of the screen. 113. Journal of SMPE, “The Eastman Business Kodascope.” 114. Ibid., 1177. 115. Developed by Akeley-Leventhal, a company founded by Carl Akeley, the well-known explorer and developer of cameras suitable for capturing images of nature. [Advertising Pamphlet], “Akeley-Leventhal Corporation,” \ 1939, New York World’s Fair 1939–40 Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. 116. This is true from the turn of the century. William Uricchio documents the astonishing fact that Montgomery Ward & Co issued a forty-page pamphlet in 1898 featuring magic lanterns, stereopticons, and moving picture machines. By 1900, Sears issued a fifty-page pamphlet featuring the same. Given that millions of such catalogs were printed annually, Urricchio suggests that many more millions of Americans encountered film technology and its promotional discourses this way. William Uricchio, “Selling the Motion Picture,” 71. 117. This display featured an animated short with a six-foot by eight-foot screen made to appear as the label of an oversized bottle of the anti-acid medication. “The World Fairs’ Best Salesman!” Business Screen 1, no. 8 (1939): 17–19.

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118. W. Mayer, “SMPE Trans-Lux Rear Stage Projection,” Theater Management and Theater Engineering 26, no. 22 (October 1931): 3. On the development of special lenses see also: Wilbur B. Rayton, “Short Focus Lenses for Projection with Translucent Screens,” Journal of the SMPE (December 1932): 512–21. 119. Gomery, Shared Pleasures, 145–49. 120. Ibid., 147. 121. Ibid., 149. 122. “Business Screen Reviews the New York World Fair,” Business Screen 1, no. 6 (1939): 19. 123. Cowan, Walter Ruttman.

Chapter Three. Mobilizing Portability 1. Motion Picture Association of America, “Report of the Film Survey Committee,” July 5, 1954, Binger Collection, American Museum of the Moving Image, New York. 2. For a more thorough summary of the rise of the American military, see Paul A.  C. Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1865–1919 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997); and Adrian R. Lewis, The American Culture of War: The History of US Military Force from World War II to Operation Iraqi Freedom (London: Routledge, 2007). 3. See Scott, “Managing the Trauma of Labor.” 4. For a fascinating study of the use of film technologies in atomic testing, see Susan Courtney, “Framing the Bomb in the West: The View from Lookout Mountain,” in Wasson and Grieveson, Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex, 210–26. 5. On the production of training films and their circulation, see Noah Tsika, “From Wartime Instruction to Superpower Cinema: Maintaining the Military-Industrial Documentary,” in Wasson and Grieveson, Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex, 192–209; and Tsika, Traumatic Imprints: Cinema, Military Psychiatry, and the Aftermath of War (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). 6. Consider The Big Picture which aired on various networks from 1951 to 1964 and then in syndication until 1970. The program was a half-hour weekly show that featured military-made documentaries put together by the Army Pictorial Service, using its vast library of materials and considerable production infrastructure. 7. There is considerable work in this area. See for instance Gerd Horten, Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Radio during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); James Schwoch, Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946–69 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); and Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computer and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

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8. See Melnick, “An Army of Theatres: Military, Technological, and Industrial Change in US Army Motion-Picture Exhibition,” in Wasson and Grieveson, Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex, 75–94. 9. Marzola, “A Society Apart.” 10. For a good overview of Hollywood-OWI relations see Clayton R. Koppes, “Regulating the Screen: The Office of War Information and the Production Code Administration,” in Schatz, Boom and Bust, 262–81. Thomas Doherty provides an excellent overview of nonfiction filmmaking during the war, with an indispensable overview of military filmmaking and the role of Hollywood personnel in it. “Documenting the 1940s,” in Schatz, Boom and Bust, 397–421. 11. By 1945, these same films circulated on 35 mm were made available on 16 mm as part of the Sixth War Loan Drive. According to reports, twenty-five thousand civilian-use 16 mm projectors were being used to circulate militarymade films within the United States, more than the number of operating movie theaters. “6th War Loan,” Business Screen 6, no. 2 (1945): 36. Later reports in this same publication indicate that the National 16  mm War Loan Committee oversaw a campaign that drew some twenty-three million attendees, who showed up for screenings in war plants, labor organizations, farm groups, churches, schools, and women’s organizations. “War Bond Films Show to 23,500,000,” Business Screen 6, no. 3 (1945): 27. 12. Some of this footage appeared in newsreels or public relations and morale films, ushering in a rougher, less polished style, which in turn shaped Hollywood films. This stylistic influence (back and forth) is documented by Zimmerman, Reel Families, 90–111. 13. Mary Beth Haralovich, “The Hollywood Studio System, 1942–1945,” in Schatz, Boom and Bust, 181. 14. For a recent overview of Hollywood filmmakers during the war see Mark Harris, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (New York: Penguin Press, 2014). See also Marsha Gordon, Film Is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies (London: Oxford University Press, 2017), which explores Fuller’s early training while enlisted before considering his epic contributions to the “war film” genre. 15. See Richard Griffith, “The Use of Films by the U.S. Armed Services,” in Documentary Film: The Use of the Film Medium to Interpret Creatively and in Social Terms the Life of the People as It Exists in Reality, 3rd ed., ed. Paul Rotha, Richard Griffith, Sinclair Road, and John Grierson (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 345. See also Gordon, Film Is Like a Battleground. 16. For a concise summary of Hollywood’s war activities see Schatz, “The Motion Picture Industry during World War II,” 131–68; and “Wartime Stars, Genres, and Production Trends,” 203–61, especially 239–61; and Koppes, “Regulating the Screen,” in Schatz, Boom and Bust. 17. For these lower but also earlier estimates see “Over a Million Service Men See Motion Pictures Daily,” Film World 1, no. 2 (1945): 45; and “Army Boosts Demand” Film World 1, no. 6 (1945): 198.

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18. Such films include: Rhapsody in Blue (1945), Weekend at the Waldorf (1945), The Big Sleep (1946), Captain Eddie (1945), Blood on the Sun (1945), My Reputation (1946), Conflict (1945), Saratoga Trunk (1945), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), Going My Way (1944), and others. Seymour R. Mayer, “The Overseas Motion Picture Service,” Business Screen 7, no. 1 (1946), 65. For a fascinating discussion of the often rowdy and highly engaged manner of viewing that was typical of wartime film spectatorship by active-duty soldiers, see William Friedman Fagelson, “Fighting Films: The Everyday Tactics of World War II Soldiers,” Cinema Journal 40, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 94–112. 19. “Wartime Conservation in Theater Projection,” Journal of the SMPE (June 1942): 515–25. 20. For a discussion about the broader geo-political importance of procuring celluloid during the war, see Lovejoy, “Celluloid Geopolitics.” For an overview of the studio system during this period see Thomas Schatz, “The Motion Picture Industry during World War II,” in Boom and Bust, ed. Schatz, 131–68; and Mayer, “The Overseas Motion Picture Service.” For a concise overview of Hollywood’s War Activities Committee and its agreement with the government regarding special considerations by the Selective Service Board (draft) to protect key personnel, and the War Production Board, to safeguard key materials—primarily celluloid, see K. R. M. Short, “Washington’s Information Manual for Hollywood, 1942,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 3, no. 2 (1983): 171–73. For a concise summary of the guidelines handed to Hollywood for its films and the messages it should and should not impart, see “Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 3, no. 2 (1983): 173–80. This arrangement seems to have been meted out in an unfair fashion across the spectrum of the educational and industrial film industry, with continued lobbying on Hollywood’s part for better treatment and ultimately more film stock. See, for instance, wherein the editor of Business Screen highlighted the unfairness of Hollywood’s riches, “An Open Letter to the War Production Board,” Business Screen 6, no. 3 (1945): 8. Members of the beleaguered outsiders argued unsuccessfully that film should be regulated during wartime just like paper was, with any kind of inequitable control over one segment of the industry defined as a de facto kind of censorship. Alas, industrial and educational film lacked such legal protections, so entertainment had secured a protected status during the war that factual, educational, training, and business films had not. 21. For contemporaneous comment on gun cameras, see R. S. Quackenbush, “The Gun Camera,” Journal of the SMPE (May 1945): 364–71. For an interesting and prescient treatment of this framed through the lens of amateur filmmaking and equipment innovation, see Zimmerman, Reel Families, in particular, “Cameras and Guns.” 22. For a brief overview of military influence on cameras see RaimondoSouto, Motion Picture Photography, in particular, 293–96. 23. For a fascinating discussion about the Office of Strategic Services and its enlisting of key industrial designers to fashion new command centers and war

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rooms, see Barry Katz, “The Arts of War: ‘Visual Presentation’ and National Intelligence,” Design Issues 12, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 3–21. 24. Microfilm and projectors were essential elements to the “memex,” a speculative machine that presaged the modern computer. See for instance Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, 101–8. Bush headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, responsible for harnessing research in science to military research and development. He is widely understood as a crucial inspiration for the emerging and first generation of computer scientists. 25. See for instance M. E. Gillette, “The Use of Films in the US Army,” Journal of the SMPE (February 1936): 173–82; William R. McGee, “Cinematography Goes to War,” Journal of the SMPE (February 1944): 102–12; C. H. Woodward, “The Motion Picture Program of the Industrial Incentive Division, U.S. Navy,” Journal of the SMPE (February 1944): 113–16; Reutell, “The Standardized 16mm JAN Projector,” Journal of the SMPTE 68, no. 12 (December 1959), 828–31; and Max Kosarin, “Preparation of Foreign-Language Version of US Army Films,” Journal of the SMPE (June 1954): 419–22. 26. The SMPE welcomed a report on film use by the Soviet Army, which included information about its application of multimedia vehicles equipped with motion pictures, radio microphones, and phonographs that traveled to military camps and showed films during the day. G. L. Irsky, “Motion Pictures in the Soviet Union,” Journal of the SMPE (June 1942): 532–40. Recent research has shown that many other militaries also had active film programs during this period, including Canada, Britain, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s and Goebbels use of, and admiration for cinema is widely known. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will remains the most famous of militarized filmmaking. Britain’s long tradition of documentary filmmaking readily fed into widespread wartime and military use of film. Mobile projection units, portable equipment, and 16 mm films yielded an estimated audience across the United Kingdom of sixteen million in 1944–45. The use of mobile units, in particular, by the British government was considerable during the war, numbering nine hundred, with a further three hundred stationary projectors at select locations by 1944. The British military used film extensively for public relations, training, education, and recording purposes. The Army, Royal Air Force, and Navy each had active film units. One estimate indicates up to three hundred films made per year by the Army, with applications including battle tactics and airplane recognition, as well as hygiene and upkeep of morale. The British Air Force used aerial films to document operations, analyze operations, and train pilots and crews, as well as assist aeronautical engineers in designing and refining aircraft. All Navy ships had at least one film projector, with a film equipment allocation based on the size of ship and its class. There were an estimated five thousand projectionists trained each year by the Navy. See “The Documentary Film during the War,” in The Factual Film. A Survey Sponsored by the Dartington Hall Trustees (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 63–104; The Canadian military also had an active film program. For a partial treatment

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of that see Peter Lester, “‘Four Cents to Sea’: 16mm, the Royal Canadian Naval Film Society and the Mobilization of Entertainment,” Film History 25, no. 4. (2013): 62–81; and “‘Sweet Sixteen’ Goes to War: Hollywood, the NAAF and 16mm Film Exhibition in Canada during World War II,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 19, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 2–19. Both Canada and Britain shared materials with the United States. On Czechoslovakian military film use, see Alice Lovejoy Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). Lovejoy also discusses the postwar use of mobile film units and the long-standing and varied uses of film by the military that extended far beyond utilitarianism and basic operations. 27. For a list of presentations, see “Program of the Fifty-Third SemiAnnual Meeting,” Journal of the SMPE (June 1943): 391. 28. See, for instance, the September 1943 issue of the Journal of the SMPE. 29. D. E. Hyndman, “Report of the Engineering Vice-President on Standardization,” Journal of the SMPE 43, no. 1 (July 1944): 1–4. Hyndman was the vice president for the SMPE and presented this published report at the April 19, 1944, meeting of the Technical Conference. Members of the SMPE worked with a subcommittee of the American Standards Association, the “War Standards Committee on Photography and Cinematography,” and the War Production Board. This larger committee acted partly as a centralized source for requests from distinct wings of the military institutions, including the Signal Corps, the Army Air Forces, the US Army Engineer Corps, the Bureau of Aeronautics, the US Navy, and the US Marine Corps. The SMPE also had its own standards committee, and subcommittees that specifically addressed 16 mm cinematography, sound, projection, and laboratory practices, representatives of which served on this joint committee. 30. Lovejoy, “Celluloid Geopolitics.” 31. From Bell and Howell, Annual Report, 1946, Bell and Howell Corporate Archive, 3. Bell and Howell also made cameras, optical equipment such as tank telescopes, bore-sighting tool kits, reflector sights for remote gun control systems on B-29 Bombers, and rifle sights. Zimmerman notes that film cameras were adapted during the war to military needs. One such example includes a project to mount them in fighter aircraft to record the accuracy of machine gun fire on the target. Zimmerman likens such uses to a “time-and-motion study camera to evaluate gunners.” Reel Families, 64. Other wartime innovations by Bell and Howell included adapting their cameras (Eyemo and Filmo) to be housed in heavier-gauge metal and use pre-threaded film magazines for easy loading. These were reportedly used by the Signal Corps in combat fieldwork. See Zimmerman, “Guns and Cameras,” in Reel Families. 32. Richard Koszarski, “Subway Commandos: Hollywood Filmmakers at the Signal Corps Photographic Center,” Film History 14 (2002): 305. For a very helpful contemporaneous description that explains the full operations of the Army Pictorial Service and its many functions, which included the V-mail (microfilming of mail) program, see H. C. Ingles, “By Way of Introduction,”

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Business Screen 7, no. 1 (1946): 30–32; and Edward L. Munson, “The Army Pictorial Service,” Business Screen 7, no. 1 (1945): 33. 33. See Munson, “The Army Pictorial Service.” 34. Lloyd T. Goldsmith, “Pictorial Engineering and Research,” Business Screen 7, no. 1 (1946): 66, 98. These viewing units bear close relationship to those discussed by Kelley in her essay “Mobilizing the Moving Image” in Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex and her book Soundies. This article by Goldsmith also notes the development of a camera-developer unit for motion picture film, which both takes the picture and then processes it automatically onto a small translucent screen within two minutes. 35. This activity was based at Wright Field, Ohio. See for instance P. M. Thomas and C. H. Coles “Specialized Photography Applied to Engineering in the Army Air Forces” in Journal of the SMPE (March 1946): 220–30. 36. A comprehensive overview of military film infrastructures is laid out in “Report of the Film Survey Committee,” Binger Collection, American Museum of the Moving Image. 37. Orville Goldner, “The Story of Navy Training Films,” Business Screen 6, no. 5 (1945): 29. 38. Ibid. With filmed material that was too sensitive for civilian firms, the military required the capacity to process its own footage. For example, what Griffith called “filmed communiques” were often unadorned reportage meant for use by military leadership and required a highly controlled mode of production, circulation, and viewing. This included extensive coverage of fighting, “recorded by uniformed cameramen of the various services and constantly rushed back by air to Washington for the High Command,” and “thus in a manner hitherto unknown able to study the detail of each operation at first hand, and thereby to determine and analyse a variety of facts, such as the efficiency of weapons, the success or failure of training methods, plans, tactics, as well as of enemy action.” Griffith, “The Use of Films,” 345. 39. H. C. Brecha, “Wright Field Training Film Production Laboratory,” Journal of the SMPE (Dec 1942): 348–52. The Army Air Force had special training needs that included pilots but also technical and support crew. Several hundred personnel worked at this location, including experts in animation and special effects. 40. “Industrial Motion Picture Companies Produce 3,747 Reels of War Training Films,” Business Screen, 6, no. 3 (1945): 15. For more on wartime politics related to film stock, see Lovejoy, “Celluloid Geopolitics.” 41. See Florian Hoof, “Between the Front Lines: Military Training Films, Machine Guns, and the Great War,” in Wasson and Grieveson, Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex. For a contemporaneous discussion, see Charles Frederick Carter, “Speeding Military Training Films,” Educational Film Magazine (January 1919): 15. 42. Scott Curtis, “Images of Efficiency: The Films of Frank B. Gilbreth: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media,” in Hediger and Vonderau, Films That Work. Curtis makes the provocative argument that Gilbreth was

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a media opportunist, selling the appearance of efficiency as much as an actual organizational system to achieve it. 43. See Hoof, “Between the Front Lines.” 44. Colonel Emanuel Cohen notes no more than sixty-three training films by the end of World War I. Cohen, “Film Is a Weapon,” Business Screen 7, no. 1 (1946): 44, 72. But, R. C. Barrett indicates that there were also sporadic social hygiene films as well as roughly one hundred training films by the end of the war. Barrett, “The Signal Corps Photographic Center,” Business Screen 7, no. 1 (1946): 34–37. 45. Sue Collins, “Film, Cultural Policy, and World War I Training Camps: Send Your Soldier to the Show with Smileage,” Film History 26, no. 1 (2014): 28. 46. For an important examination of the use of film to support imperial aggression and war by the United States, see Lee Grieveson, “War, Media, and the Security of State and Capital,” in Wasson and Grieveson, Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex, 261–80; see also Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations. 47. US Navy Instructions, US Bureau of Navy Personnel, 1922. 48. For examples of postwar summaries of wartime training programs and rationale see Griffith, “The Use of Films”; See also James J. Gibson, Motion Picture Testing and Research,” Army Air Force Aviation Psychology Program Research Reports, Prepared for United States Army Air Forces (Washington, DC: Defense Documentation Center, 1947). See also, Charles Hoban, Movies That Teach (New York: Dryden Press, 1946). 49. Film was applied to help soldiers develop practical skills including peripheral, rapid, and night vision. See Richard P Buch, “Night Vision for Airmen: A Study in Light Contrasts,” Business Screen 6, no. 5 (1945): 69, 112. Films were also used to train soldiers in how to quickly identify airplanes, ships, buildings, and elements of the natural environment by their shadows, outlines, and shapes, and not their daylight particulars. These devices accompanied previous devices such as the Evelyn Two-Dimensional Trainer, which used shadowgraphs of a countryside panorama or seascape enlarged in a totally dark room. Other uses of film helped to train the perceptual capacities of soldiers. For instance, while most training films were in black and white, color film was used to train servicemen to better identify camouflage. William Ralke, “Operation of a Service Command Central Film Library,” Business Screen 7, no. 1 (1946): 58. For an overview of other training techniques for the Army Air Forces see Howard A. Gray, “Developments in Army Air Forces Training Films,” Journal of the SMPE (May 1945): 372–76. Such films also prepared soldiers for capture and interrogation protocols, which entailed preparation both for their own capture and the capture of enemy soldiers. Slow-motion films were also used to help soldiers understand ordinance detonation. 50. For more on this see Kaia Scott, Picturing the Damaged Mind: Film and Techniques of Visualization in the Modernization of WWII Military Psychiatry (PhD diss., Concordia University, 2018); and Tsika, Traumatic Imprints.

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51. Boyd T. Wolff, “Film Utilization,” Journal of the SMPE (September1943): 255–62. 52. Business Screen 7, no. 1 (1946). Statistics are scattered throughout this special issue devoted to the Army Pictorial Service. As such, these numbers address this particular unit, the largest of the film organizations within the military. They likely to do not include statistics for the Navy or the Air Force. 53. See Melnick, “An Army of Theatres.” 54. “U.S. Borrowing 16mm Projectors for Troops,” Variety, March 18, 1942, 4. 55. These sources indicate that the bulk of these projectors were being sold to industrial concerns. “Facts about Civilian Supply,” Business Screen 8 (1943), 19. 56. See Greg Waller, “Projecting the Promise of 16mm, 1935–45,” in Acland and Wasson, Useful Cinema, 125–48. 57. See “JAN-P-49,” 31 May 1944, Joint Army Navy Specification: Projection Equipment, Sound Motion Picture, 16-mm, Class I, National Archives Records Administration (NARA). 58. The document outlining the JAN protocol was not issued until May 31, 1944. The first projectors issuing from the protocol were not ready to use until the war ended. For a succinct overview of its development, see James A. Moses, “Trends of 16mm Projector Equipment in the Army,” Journal of the SMPE (1950): 525–35. 59. For an easily accessible description of this protocol and its evolution over the years, see Reutell, “The Standardization of the JAN Projector.” See also Philip M. Cowett, “Department of Defense Photographic Standardization Plans,” Journal of the SMPE (September 1957): 535–37. Reutell reports that the JAN-P-49 specifications were first agreed upon in 1943, but my findings indicate that the work of the joint committee was not completed until spring 1944, with the protocol published May 31, 1944. 60. Raymond Spottiswoode, Film and Its Techniques (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 260. An interesting side note, some military “cultural technologies” were less designed for sturdiness than for planned degeneration. During World War II, augmenting the military’s well-developed book-lending service, the American publishing industry issued 122 million copies of 1,322 paperback titles in an unusual disposable printing format. The books were designed for portability: they were foldable and to be carried in a soldier’s pocket or slipped into a pack, but also were to decompose after a certain number of readings. Christopher P. Loss, “Reading between Enemy Lines: Armed Services Editions and World War II,” The Journal of Military History 67, no. 3 (July 2003): 811–34. 61. See for instance, the ads by Victor Animatograph that circulated in 1945, which declared that its machines could “take the beating,” and were pictured on a soldier’s shoulder as he walks, rifle under arm, onto a beach, with smoldering munitions in the background. This was a machine, Victor claimed,

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with “guts,” like men, proven in the field with ample application back home, aiding production in industry and military training. “Victor Projectors,” Business Screen 6, no. 5 (1945): inside cover. 62. For frequently invoked ideas about the uncanny relations between cinema and abstraction, see Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989). For another recurring set of speculations that postulates a deep connection between the machine regularity of cinema and that of the machine gun, see Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989). 63. For JAN technical specifications, see Spottiswoode, Film and Its Techniques. It is important to note here that illumination technologies have changed dramatically. JAN projectors used incandescent bulbs, while contemporary commercial theaters use xenon light bulbs. 64. For a more complete overview of projectors in the field, see Levinson, “Operation and Maintenance.” Some problems were endemic to the scale and scope of military operations. For instance, procuring replacement parts in a timely fashion, a problem faced by all manner of technical equipment. Other problems were specific to projectors, such as treating parts for moisture and fungus, replacing fragile photocells, and damage caused by handling. Spare parts typically accompanied new projectors. By the end of the war there were elaborate operation and repair manuals, as well as detailed diagrams and numbered parts for ease of ordering. Projectors also require regular cleaning and oiling. Eventually, specific projector tool kits were issued to keep projectors running. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 64. 67. Moses, “Trends of 16mm Projector Equipment,” 529. Other reports indicate that several manufacturers submitted projectors that approximated the JAN protocol but did not quite meet it. The protocol acted as an aspirational document until after the war. See Levinson, “Operation and Maintenance.” 68. For an overview of film use and types of films used, see Robert A. Kissack, “Army Film Distribution and Exhibition,” Journal of the SMPE (January 1946): 26–29. See also J. D. Finn, “Film Distribution,” Journal of the SMPE (September 1943): 251–54. These articles describe an international library system, the circulation and use of foreign-made films, and distribution of American films to allies. 69. Levinson, “Operation and Maintenance.” Several years later, Moses reported to the industry that by the end of the war, the Signal Corps alone had procured more than sixteen thousand projectors from several commercial manufacturers. Moses, “Trends of 16mm.” Moses also reports hundreds of thousands of 16 mm training films, far overshadowing the mere thousands of Hollywood entertainment film shipped overseas (527). Moses wove a heroic tale of machines put to work, overcoming all manner of challenges (overuse, fungus, extreme temperatures, corrosion). He notes that the challenges of common projector breakdown were partly offset by “improvisation, local fabrication and

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substitution.” He also suggests that jeep and motorcycle tail lamps were often used to replace projector bulbs to get them working again (527). 70. Gloria Waldron, The Information Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 15. 71. All data here are from the “1954 Census Report on the United States Photographic Equipment and Supplies Industry,” in Report from Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, cited in Wolfman, 1959 Annual Statistical Report, 8–9. These reports show roughly sixty thousand projectors shipped per year at mid-decade. A healthy mix of silent and sound 16 mm projectors sold for almost twenty years after the war. For more industry statistics and a helpful table that provides an overview of both 8 mm and 16 mm devices, see table 1, chapter 4. 72. Theater statistics from Film Daily Yearbook. Cited in Schatz, Boom and Bust, appendix 1, 461. 73. “Jan-P-229: Projection Equipment, Sound Motion Picture, 16-mm, Continuous”, 27 June 1945, NARA. 74. See Scott, “Managing the Trauma of Labor.” 75. See Gibson, Motion Picture Testing and Research. See in particular “The Instructional Techniques Peculiar to Motion Pictures,” 241–60. These reports explored all manner of variables, including illumination of room and brightness of screen, angle of viewing, size of image, disrupting the film, talking over the film, size of audience, position of student in room, position of student in relation to screen, air flow in room, role of accompanying pedagogical techniques and devices (teachers, other illustrations, notebooks and note taking, text books). 76. McCarthy, Ambient Television. 77. “New: Audio-Visual Medium for Training!” Business Screen 6, no. 2 (1945), 31. 78. Ibid. 79. Kelley notes thirty-five hundred machines at their peak from 1941 to 1947. See “‘A Revolution in the Atmosphere”; and Soundies. 80. On the other uses of daylight cinema, see Grieveson, “The Cinema and the (Common) Wealth of Nations,” in Empire and Film, 73–114; and Cowan, “From the Astonished Spectator.” See also chapter 2 of this book. 81. See Hoban on working to make films that were sufficiently engaging so that they could stand alone and rely less on instructor intervention. Hoban (Lt. Colonel) and Moses (Army Pictorial Service), “Cameo Film Production Technique.” 82. Walter M. Clark and Lee R. Richardson, “Film Reader for Data Analysis,” Journal of the SMPE (December 1951): 574–79. 83. Ibid, 574. 84. Fred Waller, “The Waller Flexible Gunnery Trainer,” Journal of the SMPE (July 1946): 73–87. 85. Giles Taylor, “A Military Use of Widescreen Cinema: Training the Body through Immersive Media,” The Velvet Light Trap 72 (Fall 2013): 17–32.

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86. For more on this, see Fred Waller, “The Archeology of Cinerama.” 87. Taylor, “A Military Use of Widescreen,” 17. 88. DeVry advertised its training device on the pages of Business Screen, calling it a “Panoramic Gunnery Trainer.” It was a self-enclosed device, articulated to a single pilot, who leaned into the machine, looking through a viewfinder, while wearing headphones. See DeVry advertisement, “Johnny Got His First Zero with Optical Bullets!” Business Screen 6, no. 5 (1945): 97. The ad elided differences across sectors, extolling the utility of its trainer for soldiers, workers, salesmen, and students alike. The trainer was billed as a low-cost way to supply “accurately simulated combat experience” without risk. 89. “A Great Navy War Loan Exposition in Chicago Attracts 4,000,000 Visitors to Visual Exhibits,” Business Screen 6, no. 2 (1945): 23–26. Film technologies were also deeply embroiled in boosterism for films devoted to civil defense and incentivizing industrial productivity. Manufacturers also participated in industrial exhibitions where they could feature their evolving technological innovations. One such exhibit, called “Friend or Foe,” tested visitor’s ability to recognize ships and aircraft day or night, by peering through small views placed in a wall (26). Such expositions were primarily aimed at fund-raising and morale. They were also linked to bond drives. 90. Hazard Reeves, In America (1950 Cinerama Inc. and Reeves Soundcraft), 19, http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/ciabook19.htm (accessed June 3, 2019). 91. For the standard history of widescreen film, see Belton, Widescreen Cinema. 92. For an excellent overview of Cinerama in relation to the military, the Cold War, and US foreign policy, see Rebecca Prime, “Through America’s Eyes: Cinerama and the Cold War,” in Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex, 61–74. 93. Announced in “16mm Cinemascope,” Educational Screen (October 1953), 364. Tepperman discusses this and the emergence of small gauge 3D technologies during this decade. See Tepperman, Amateur Cinema, chapter 4. 94. Jerry Fairbanks, “Use of Cinemascope in 16mm Nontheatrical Films,” Journal of the SMPTE (September 1955): 493–94. 95. F. G. Back, “Nonintermittent Motion Picture with Variable Magnification” Journal of the SMPE (September 1946): 248–53. 96. The Air Force used many methods to help pilots improve their sense of sight while in flight. Identifying enemy aircraft was of particular importance. This led to many visual techniques including films and flashcards. They also used 3D View-Masters. Mary Ann Sell and Wolfgang Sell, “View-Master in WWII: Military Training Reels,” in View-Master Memories, ed. Mary Ann Sell, Wolfgang Sell, and Charley van Pelt (Maineville, OH: Self-Published by Mary Ann Sell and Wolfgang Sell, 2000; 2nd printing, 2007), 229–31. 97. For a brief overview of military influence on camera development, see Raimondo-Souto, Motion Picture Photography, especially, 293–96. 98. See for instance P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American AvantGarde, 1943–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); Youngblood,

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Expanded Cinema; David James, ed., To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 99. Lovejoy demonstrates the paradigmatic role of the Czech army’s filmmaking practices in modernist film experimentation, and in postwar new wave movements in Army Film and the Avant Garde. 100. This approach is indebted to that of Turner’s recent book, The Democratic Surround, which links the history of multimedia and technological immersion to its intricate history with artists, designers, and state institutions. 101. A compelling example of formal experimentation in educational media can be seen in the work of Hoban and Moses, “Cameo Film Production Technique.” The film discussed in this article attempts to teach military personnel how to operate a film projector, using direct address, off-screen voices, calland-response techniques, and repetition to ensure effective teaching. 102. See O. H. Coellin Jr., “G.I. Movies as Important to the Men as Rations,” Business Screen 7, no. 1 (1946): 59. 103. See Zoë Druick, “UNESCO, Film, and Education: Mediating Postwar Paradigms of Communication,” in Acland and Wasson, Useful Cinema, 81–102. 104. See Case, “Some Engineering Aspects.” And manufacturers continued well after the war to meet the performance ideals laid out in the protocol. See, for instance, a representative of Eastman Kodak, Edwin C. Fritts, declaring definitive progress toward JAN protocols in 1950. “A Heavy-Duty 16mm Sound Projector,” Journal of the SMPE (October 1950): 425–38. See also chapter 4 of this book. 105. This work is already beginning. For example, see Scott Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Cowan, Walter Ruttman; and Nieland, Happiness by Design.

Chapter Four. Portable Projectors and the Electronic Age 1. Paul Wagner, “What’s Past Is Prologue . . .,” in Film Council of America, Sixty Years of 16mm Film 1923–1983 (Evanston, IL: Film Council of America, 1954), 9. 2. Wagner also imagined a range of complementary media, themselves with futurity built in. In 1954 he speculated that television would eventually develop the capacity to record the content that appeared and sounded through it, allowing the playback of audiovisual and audile content. He predicted that television would eventually transform theaters into sites for mass, live broadcasts of Broadway shows, as well as films. Wagner also foresaw the replacement of 16 mm by magnetic tape, a reality that would arise some thirty years later. He was ultimately agnostic about celluloid per se and more an enthusiast of an AV playback system that was flexible enough to serve specialized audiences (ibid., 17). 3. Ibid., 12.

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4. Charles R. Acland, “Classroom, Clubs and Community Circuits: Cultural Authority and the Film Council Movement, 1946–1957,” in Inventing Film Studies, 155. The number was likely much higher. Some estimates suggest that thirty-five thousand projectors a year were being manufactured in 1939, 1940, and 1941, in the lead-up to the war, though the bulk of these projectors were being sold to industrial concerns. “Facts about Civilian Supply,” Business Screen 4, no. 8 (1943): 19. 5. Acland, “Classroom, Clubs and Community Circuits,” 155. 6. Charles R. Acland, “Celluloid Classrooms and Everyday Projectionists,” in Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, ed. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 381. 7. Acland maps the rise of portable media devices, among them 16 mm projectors, through the figure of Edgar Dale, an important participant in the Payne Fund Studies and longtime devotee of technologically enhanced learning. For a full accounting of Dale and the broader context in which American educators fortified a deep enthusiasm for technological learning and adaptation to mediated environments, see Charles Acland, “American AV: Edgar Dale and the Information Age Classroom,” Technology and Culture, 58, no. 2 (April 2017): 392–421. 8. McLuhan’s concepts of hot and cool media are most fully elaborated in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) 9. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Post War America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 13. 10. Spigel, Make Room for TV. 11. McCarthy, Ambient Television. 12. Keir Keightley, “‘Turn it down!’ she shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948–59,” Popular Music 15, no. 2 (1996): 149–77. Keightley notes that the rise of high-fidelity playback led to the rise of sound effects LPs, with recordings of things like steam trains, thunderstorms, and church bells as ways to verify the quality of the reproduction system. These were the equivalent of tech-demos, where the system’s fullest capacities are featured using sounds likely to cause wonder in listeners (152). Keightley suggests that such LPs were understood as “sound-for-its-own-sake” records, fostering deeper appreciation through a library of sounds and their magnificent reproduction. Likewise, Steve Wurtzler has identified similar albums marketed to home movie makers during this period in search of sound effects for their films. See Wurtzler, “Sound and Domestic Screens.” 13. Keightley, “‘Turn it down!,’”158. Keightley builds on David Nye’s important Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880– 1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 14. For the classic feminist analysis of household appliances and discourses of efficiency, see Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

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15. For a focused exploration of the ambivalence of this thrilling gigantism, see Rogers, Cinematic Appeals, especially chapter 1, “‘Smothered in Baked Alaska’: The Anxious Appeal of Widescreen Cinema,” 19–60. 16. Belton, Widescreen Cinema. 17. Ibid., and Rogers, “‘Smothered in Baked Alaska.’” 18. For more on Cinerama’s military and gender links see Prime, “Through America’s Eyes.” For a discussion of widescreen and gender, see Rogers, “‘Smothered in Baked Alaska.’” 19. Prime, “Through America’s Eyes.” 20. For a fulsome accounting of this trend, see Acland, American Blockbuster. Acland examines the rise of the “blockbuster” during this period, which he argues was both a type of film and a mode of production and marketing. 21. For a discussion about gender and portable projectors, see Wasson, “Electric Homes! Automatic Movies!” 22. For instance, Lauren Rabinovitz writes about the rise of experimental filmmaking after the war: “More important, the surplus of used equipment after the war and Eastman Kodak’s need to find new markets to replace dwindling military consumption resulted in more economical and more readily available materials and processing.” Rabinovitz, “Experimental and AvantGarde Cinema in the 1940s,” in Boom or Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, ed. Thomas Schatz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 447. This is an otherwise excellent essay, though it should also be pointed out that Rabinovitz overstates here the role of Eastman Kodak, which, while important, was but one of several major projector manufacturers. 23. See Scott MacDonald, ed., Cinema 16: Documents toward a History of the Film Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 24. “Little Hope for U.S. Surplus Property Projectors; 16mm. Mfrs. Map Sked,” Variety, December 26, 1945, 7. See also “Cameras Listed in Surplus Sales,” New York Times, April 14, 1947, 34. 25. D. E. Hyndman was the vice president for the SMPE and presented this published report at the April 19, 1944, meeting of the SMPE’s Technical Conference. Members of the SMPE worked with a subcommittee of the American Standards Association, entitled the War Standards Committee on Photography and Cinematography, along with the War Production Board. This larger committee acted partly as a centralized source for requests from distinct wings of the military institutions, including the Signal Corps, the Army Air Forces, the US Army Engineer Corps, the Bureau of Aeronautics, the US Navy and the US Marine Corps. The SMPE also had its own standards committee, and subcommittees that specifically addressed 16 mm cinematography, sound, projection, and laboratory practices. Representatives from this SMPE committee served on the aforementioned joint committee. Hyndman, “Report of the Engineering Vice-President.” 26. For an example of the persistence of military-language and protocol in advertising campaigns for portable projectors, see Bell and Howell advertisement, “Five Ways to Strengthen Communication,” Business Screen 16,

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no. 5 (1955): 3. This is a fantastically telling advertisement as, not only did Bell and Howell proudly market its projectors with military nomenclature, it also gloated about an honorary Academy Award for its “pioneering contributions to the Motion Picture Industry.” Hollywood, film technology interests, and military endorsements continued to converge happily. For another example of film technology companies invoking the military well after wartime triumphs, see “DeVry’s New Sensational Jan Unit” Business Screen 14, no. 2 (1953): 57. 27. For more on the term “residual media” inspired by the work of Raymond Williams, see Acland “Introduction: Residual Media,” in Residual Media, xiii–xxvii. 28. Interesting to note here is that a significant number of portable projectors in operation were 8 mm projectors that would have been so-called “silent” devices, with no capacity for playing sound. Sound playback on 8 mm projectors became available in the early 1960s and then increased notably in the second half of the decade. In addition to this, industry statistics show that 16 mm projector sales peaked in the 1970s. Hope reported nearly 80,000 sound units sold in 1971. See “Equipment” in Hope Reports AV-USA 1973–74, 29. Throughout the later 1970s and 1980s, sales of 16  mm were in clear decline but an infrastructure remained in place and in operation throughout the decade. See Hope, “AV Installed Equipment Base,” Media Market Trends V (Rochester, NY: Hope Reports, Inc., 1989), table 3, p. 12. This 1989 Hope report indicated that 16  mm projectors maintained a significant presence across institutional spheres, with an estimated 1,356,700 projectors still running. 29. See Hoyt, Hollywood Vault, especially chapter 4. 30. The FBI actively investigated such screenings and those caught were prosecuted. For industry coverage of FBI investigations into the unsanctioned circulation of military film prints, see “Competition Feared from Army in 16mm. Field as Plan to Dump Surplus Looms,” Variety, December 19, 1945, 9; and “Army Service Recovers Stolen 16mm Prints,” Boxoffice, August 14, 1948, 41. 31. Hoyt writes that MGM was so eager to prevent its theatrical business model from being weakened that it insisted on clauses in contracts when loaning out its stars to prevent that star from being seen in 16 mm versions of a film. MGM also did not permit its stars to appear on television during this period. Hoyt, Hollywood Vault, 128–30. 32. Ibid., 134. 33. See Hoyt, Hollywood Vault, especially chapter 4. 34. Nonetheless, Universal’s revenue from 16 mm prints were ultimately fairly steady, and rising during the 1950s. These same 16  mm films also became crucial for rentals to television (ibid., 137–38, and see chart on 138). The postwar Association for Non-Theatrical Film apparently worked hard to arrive at a 16 mm code of ethics that would placate theater owners and Hollywood. See “ANFA Issues 6-Page Code for 16mm Film Industry,” Boxoffice, July 3, 1948, 38. 35. Hoyt, Hollywood Vault, 117.

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36. For a full consideration of this see Hoyt, Hollywood Vault, especially chapter 4. 37. The War Production Board imposed restrictions on consumer film equipment. Film projectors were by government order directed toward “essential war activities.” Civilian use of 16 mm technologies had to be directly linked to necessary war work and approved by the War Production Board. To meet the unprecedented demand for 16 mm projectors by the military, civilians were asked to donate 16 mm projectors. See Thomas Pryor, “Random Notes on the Film Scene,” New York Times, 20 December 1942, X3. These restrictions on projectors were being considered for relaxation midway through 1944, but still required application to the production board. See: Walter H. Waggoner, “71 WPB Limitations to Be Eased Aug. 16,” New York Times, 29 July 1944, 26. 38. Gregory Waller, “Projecting the Promise of 16mm.” 39. Ibid., 144. 40. Ibid., 128. 41. See for example Thomas Pryor, “16mm Films to the Fore,” New York Times, August 26, 1945, X3. Pryor describes an exciting new “phase of screen activity,” seen by many as likely to “surpass in scope the entertainment industry in Hollywood.” See also “New Mobile 16mm Projector for Postwar,” Variety, July 25, 1945, 6. This article speculated that 16  mm would become a “bedside projector.” In 1952, it was reported that a 16 mm drive-in opened: “16mm Drive-in Opened,” Boxoffice, June 28, 1952, 45. 42. For a discussion of Kodak’s wartime contracts and profits, see Lovejoy, “Celluloid Geopolitics.” Bell and Howell’s profits more than tripled from 1947 to 1956. Cited in Zimmerman, Reel Families, 115, from Arthur D. Little, 1956 Audit of Bell and Howell Corporation, 22, table IV, Bell and Howell Corporate Archive. Note also that Bell and Howell expanded after the war. It also began purchasing other companies, including DeVry, the largest supplier of sound projectors to the military. Cited in Zimmerman, Reel Families, 116, from Arthur D. Little, 1956 Audit of Bell and Howell Corporation, 22, table IV, Bell and Howell Corporate Archive. This report also indicated that military, industrial, and educational equipment comprised 73 percent of all sales for Bell and Howell by mid-decade. Cited in Zimmerman, Reel Families, 116, from Bell and Howell Annual Report, 1954, 37. Also important here is that the sphere of applied filmmaking in institutional contexts constituted more than half of camera sales for this one company at midcentury, according to public statements by Bell and Howell. “By 1955 the nonluxury markets of business, science, industry, government and education constituted 61% of all camera sales, according to a Bell and Howell press release issued that same year.” Quoted in Zimmerman Reel Families, 116, from Bell and Howell Press release, 27 January, 1955, 1–2. 43. For an overview of the use of 16 mm cameras in television production, see Brian Winston’s chapter, “The Case of 16mm Film,” in Technologies of Seeing, 58–87. In another sign of the normalization of 16 mm as a new mode of production, Rabinovitz notes that in 1947, the California School of Fine

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Arts became the first art school in the United States to teach 16  mm filmmaking as a regular part of its curriculum. See Rabinovitz, “Experimental and Avant Garde,” 447. For an overview of the development of 8  mm and 16 mm through the rubric of “amateur” cinema, see Tepperman, especially the chapter, “Ciné-Technology: Machine Art for a Machine Age,” in Amateur Cinema, 98–132. 44. Percival Case, “Some Engineering Aspects of Amateur Projection for the Mass Market.” Journal of the SMPE (August 1947): 139–45. 45. Ibid., 140. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 141. 48. Ibid., 142. 49. Some of these mid-century discourses resonate with, though do not exactly emulate the discourses examined by Klinger in her important book, Beyond the Multiplex. 50. See for instance, Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of EtienneJules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also Curtis, “Images of Efficiency.” And, for an examination of the path that some of Gilbreth’s ideas took within an American industrial context, see Grieveson, “The Work of Film.” 51. Wade S. Nivision, “Methods of Analyzing High-Speed Photographs,” Journal of the SMPE 52, no. 3 (March 1949): 49–60. 52. There is an increasing amount of excellent work on science film. See for instance Cahill, Zoological Realism; see also Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship; and Oliver Gaycken, Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). On medical and health films, see Kirsten Ostherr, Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 53. Courtney has demonstrated that film as a recording device and projection apparatus was essential to atomic testing. See “Framing the Bomb in the West.” See also Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman, Lookout America! The Secret Hollywood Film Studio at the Heart of the Cold War State (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2018). 54. Hope, AV-USA 1969, 24. 55. “Now . . . A Kodak Projector for your special 16mm Requirements,” [advertisement] Business Screen 14, no. 4 (1953): 51. 56. S. A. Weinberg, J. S. Watson, and G. H. Ramsey, “A 16mm Projector for Research Films,” Journal of the SMPTE 63, no. 5 (November 1954): 196. This 1954 projector was redesigned and presented again to the organization in 1957. See S. A. Weinberg, J. S. Watson, and G. H. Ramsey, “Improved 16mm Projector for Research Films,” Journal of the SMPTE 66, no. 6 (June 1957): 361–63. 57. For an in-depth discussion of the tachistoscope, see Acland, “The Swift View: Tachistoscopes and the Residual Modern,” in Acland, Residual Media, 361–84.

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58. “Progress Committee Report for 1957,” Journal of the SMPTE 66, no. 5 (May 1957): 303. 59. A. E. Nupnau and Edwin L. Smith, “A Military 16mm Assaying Projector,” Journal of the SMPTE 63, no. 10 (October 1959): 699–702. It is important to note that the military’s so-called JAN projector protocol (which stood for Joint Army Navy) evolved throughout the decades and adapted to changing technology, incorporating magnetic sound and illumination that more readily enabled larger audiences. Bell and Howell had long worked closely with the revised protocol to develop the prototype. For an overview of these changes, see Reutell, “The Standardized 16mm JAN Projector.” 60. Kruse, “Engineering Progress Opens New Vistas,” Educational Screen (May 1947): 262. The original article was presented in 1946 at an SMPE Convention in Hollywood, and appeared in a 1947 issue of SMPE Journal. 61. Announced in “Equipment: Magnetic Projector,” Educational Screen (September 1951): 290. 62. “Audio-Visual Trade Review, Equipment: Magnetic Recording Projector,” Educational Screen (March 1952): 121. Advertisements begin appearing in April of 1952. See “Now You Can Make Sound Movies!!!,” Educational Screen (April 1952), 150–51. 63. “Audio-Visual Trade Review, Equipment, Ampro Recorder-Projector,” Educational Screen (April 1952), 165. 64. “Audio-Visual Trade Review, Equipment: DeVry Recorder-Projector,” Educational Screen (Summer 1952): 250. 65. W.F.K., “Audio-Visual Trade Review, NAVA News: 1952 Convention & Trade Show,” Educational Screen (September 1952): 294. (Note: this is likely William F. Kruse.) 66. See Wurtzler, “Sound and Domestic Screens.” For a longer overview of multimedia sound practices and amateur cinema, see Czach, “The Sound of Amateur Film.” 67. Ford L. Lemler and Robert Lestma, Supplementary Course Materials in Audio-Visual Education (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Audio-Visual Education Center, 1953). 68. Many of these publications combined advocacy for 16 mm with information about and guides to film procurement as well as projector purchase, operation, repair, and application. Many also cite the influence of military film as the most important generative impetus toward the development of the 16  mm field. See for instance George H. Fern and Eldon Robbins, Teaching with Films (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing Company, 1946). This guide begins by citing the inordinate success of film for war mobilization and solider training, asserting the imperative to continue progress in modern learning (v–viii). In 1947, the American Council on Education published the results of a study made on behalf of public libraries, which surveyed the use of audiovisual aids in the Armed Services, with an eye to integrating its key insights and best practices into American classrooms. See Waldron, The Information Film. The presumed format for this new, exploding realm of activity was 16  mm.

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Waldron documents a tremendous scope and range of activity subsequent to the war. See especially “The Use of Films,” 106–45. She notes the use of 16 mm film by religious groups, activists, public libraries, and film societies with interests in art, amateur, and science films. A good deal of Edgar Dale’s postwar work built on his prewar projects but was also inspired by wartime efforts. His postwar publications emerged immediately after the conflict in 1946 and were subsequently reprinted under the same title: Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching (New York: Dryden, 1954). See also Harry L Strauss and J.R. Kidd, Look, Listen and Learn (New York: Association Press, 1948); and Hoban, Movies That Teach. This was an overview of educational film use in the armed services directed toward teachers. The Film Council of America also published a series of “How to do it” booklets (1949, Chicago). For a general overview of film education in the postwar era, see Orgeron, Orgeron, and Streible, “A History of Learning with the Lights Off,” in Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, 15–66. 69. Acland, “American AV,” 412. In one indication of the Act’s impact, industry reports suggest that educational filmmaking increased from three hundred to five hundred titles in the year following its passage. See: Flory and Hope, “Scope and Nature of Nontheatrical Films.” 70. Acland, “American AV,” 405. 71. Flory and Hope, “Scope and Nature,” 389. I have been unable to find military figures for this period. They are not reported in the postwar AV market statistics. 72. See Hope, AV-USA 1969, 25, which shows “Total 8mm Projectors in Use in Audiovisual Markets.” As of 1972, 82,600 8  mm projectors were widely sold to schools, business, industry, government, and religious organizations. While numbers indicating actual use of these devices is difficult to pin down, industry advocates did attempt to calculate this, with obsolescence factored in. These institutions were grouped under the category “AudioVisual Markets”—that is, nondomestic and institutional settings. Thomas Hope, Hope Reports AV-USA 1973–74 (Rochester, NY: Hope Reports, Inc., 1974), tables 26 and 27, pp. 30–31. The Hope reports used a formula that can only be gleaned from notes inserted into the reports, which included calculations for trade-ins, obsolescence, and also sale of secondhand projectors. This source indicates that roughly 10 percent of annual sales were deducted for obsolescence and projectors traded in, and then 5 or 6 percent added back in for “secondhand” markets. 73. Saturday Review of Literature had a “Film Forum” and “Ideas on Film” department that regularly published a nontheatrical film section. Various authors filed articles in the series. Some of these early articles have been compiled in Cecile Starr, ed., Ideas on Film (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1951). Starr worked as the “non-theatrical film editor,” for the magazine during this period. Howard Thompson published regularly in the New York Times throughout the 1950s and 1960s on the 16 mm scene. The long-running

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publication Film News, edited by Rohamma Lee, was also important for the nonfiction film field, which thrived on 16 mm circuits. 74. For the most rigorous assessment of the rhetorics of new media technologies and education in the postwar period, see Acland, “American AV.” 75. For a brief overview of this organization see: Lillian Rubin, “Commercial Film Dealers,” in Starr, Ideas on Film, 120–25. 76. “16mm Film Industry Organizes Assn. and Reviewing Board,” The Billboard 57, no. 17 (April 28, 1945): 62. 77. Acland traces this persistent thread in “American AV.” See also “A History of Learning with the Lights Off,” which provides a useful timeline for the rise of educational film from 1919 onward, 27–28. Essays in the same volume also address this period. 78. For a consideration of 16 mm film, television, and civil rights, see Anna McCarthy, ”Screen Culture and Group Discussion in Postwar Race Relations,” in Learning with the Lights Off, 397–423. For work on design and film, see Nieland, Happiness by Design. For work on health films, see Oshterr, Cinematic Prophylaxis. 79. Figures originally published in American Library Association “Public Film Library Statistics,” June 1959, Rohama Lee Papers, Iowa State University, Ms. 354 box 1 folder 19, and cited here from Acland, “Classrooms, Clubs, and Community.” 80. Wagner, “What’s Past Is Prologue,” 12. 81. For a sampling of the rising number of regular publications devoted to the 16 mm field, see for example: Film World, starting in 1945; Film Forum Review, in 1946; and Film News, which began publishing in 1939 but continued until 1981, devoted to nonfiction film. Business Screen and Educational Screen both began publishing in the late 1930s and ran for decades. 82. This begins before the war with a smattering of urban film societies and the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library in New York City. See Wasson, Museum Movies. For focused work on North American film societies, see Charles Acland, “Patterns of Cultural Authority: The National Film Society of Canada and the Institutionalization of Film Education, 1938– 1941,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 10, no. 1 (2001): 2–27. For the rise of the avant-garde and 16mm distribution, see Michael Zryd, “The Academy and the Avant-Garde: A Relationship of Dependence and Resistance,” Cinema Journal 45, no. 2 (2006): 17–42; and “Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America” in Inventing Film Studies, 182–216. See also MacDonald, Cinema 16 and also Robert Haller ed., Art in Cinema: Documents toward a History of the Film Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). For a general overview of postwar art cultures, see Rabinovitz, “Experimental and Avant-Garde Cinema.” 83. Acland, “Classroom, Clubs and Community Circuits,” 166. 84. For an examination of amateur film, see Tepperman Amateur Cinema. For the best discussion of educational AV, and films’ place in it, see Acland,

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“American AV.” For more specific case studies of educational film, see Orgeron, Orgeron, and Streible, Learning with the Lights Off. 85. Brian Jacobson, “On the Red Carpet in Rouen: Industrial Film Festivals and a World Community of Filmmakers,” in Films That Work II, eds., Vinzenz Hediger, Florian Hoof, and Yvonne Zimmerman (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming). 86. Jennifer Horne, “Experiments in Propaganda: Reintroducing James Blue’s Colombia Trilogy,” The Moving Image 9, no. 1 (Spring): 183–200. 87. For Hollywood’s efforts to dominate European markets, see Ian Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For an overview of Hollywood’s exports, see Lev, “Hollywood International” in The Fifties, 146–68. For a broader overview, see Thomas H. Guback, “Hollywood’s International Market,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 387–409. 88. For essays providing documentation and analysis of this, see Wasson and Grieveson, Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex for a fuller detailing of military film use after the war. See, in particular, essays by Prime, Courtney, and Paasche. 89. “Report of the Film Survey Committee,” Motion Picture Association of America, July 5, 1954, Binger Collection, American Museum of the Moving Image, 17. 90. Ibid., 15. 91. Ibid., 49. 92. Ibid., 50. 93. Ibid., 41. 94. Ibid., 5–6. 95. Military film applications continued to be discussed in the journal Business Screen, for instance. This included articles extolling the effectiveness of film for military imperatives. One such article read: “The widespread application by all branches of the armed services to the audio and visual tool is well known. They save time, help learners remember longer, and stimulate interest in complex, technical subject matter of modern mechanized warfare.” “Films’ Key Role in National Defense: A Preview and Predictions for the Year Ahead in Factual Films,” Business Screen 11, no. 8 (December 1950): 22. 96. Anthony Slide, Before Video: A History of the Non-Theatrical Film (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), 107. See in particular, chapter 8. 97. In his important book, Eric Schaefer provides a sweeping overview of exploitation film, whose distribution and viewing was utterly transformed by small-gauge film technologies. While Schaefer does not tend to film formats in much detail in this book, he does document a full range of cultural production (filmmaking, distribution, and viewing) that relied on small film gauges. See Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Film, 1919–1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). In subsequent work, he discusses the importance of small-gauge film for completely transforming pornographic

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films and related practices. See “Plain Brown Wrapper: Adult Films for the Home Market, 1930–1969,” in Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method, ed., Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). For an interesting consideration of the legacies of the extensive small-gauge filmmaking undertaken at the Kinsey Institute to explore human sexuality, see Linda Williams, “‘White Slavery’ versus the Ethnography of ‘Sexworkers’: Women in Stag Films at the Kinsey Archive,” The Moving Image 5, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 107–34. On the importance of amateur film collections to small-gauge porn histories, see Dwight Swanson, “Home Viewing: Pornography and Amateur Film Collections, A Case Study,” The Moving Image 5, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 136–40. 98. For a recent consideration of the legacy of Brandon Films, see Tanya Goldman, “Brandon Films’ World Film Festival Brochure, circa 1962,” Film History: An International Journal 29, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 131–56. 99. See Balsom, After Uniqueness, especially chapter 2, “8mm and the ‘Blessings’ of Books and Records,” 54–80. 100. This includes such films as The Gentle Art of Film Projection (National Film Board of Canada, 1950) and The Film and You (1948, National Film Board). For a full discussion of this, see Acland, “Celluloid Classrooms and Everyday Projectionists.” 101. Flory and Hope, “Scope and Nature,” 388. 102. “Number of Feature Films Released by the Seven Major Distribution Companies, 1960–68, 1970,” in Paul Monaco, The Sixties, 1960–1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), appendix 1. Originally published in Christopher H. Sterling and Timothy R. Haight, The Mass Media: Aspec Institute Guide to Communication Industry Trends (New York: Praeger, 1978). 103. Wolfman, 1970–71 Wolfman Report, 52. 104. Hope, AV-USA Hope Report 1973–74, 18. This is a particularly rich issue of the report as it featured a fifteen-year overview.

Epilogue 1. Uricchio, “Historicizing Media in Transition,” 24. 2. See for instance the “In Focus” dossier “The Death of 16mm?” Cinema Journal 45, no. 3 (Spring 2006), 109–40. 3. One of my favorite stories about teaching with 16 mm projectors comes from a colleague who describes quickly shoving pieces of paper into the uptake reel during class screenings to allow him to return and review those scenes later with his students. Ad hoc and imprecise, a little bit like book marks, this technique helped him to navigate the analogue form and to enable close analysis and repeat viewing of select scenes. 4. For but one example of this see Schaeffer, “Plain Brown Wrapper.” 5. Jan-Christopher Horak, “Archiving, Preserving, Screening 16mm,” Cinema Journal 45, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 112–18.

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6. On micro-cinemas see: Elena Gorfinkel, “Shown in 16mm on a Giant Screen: Adventures in Alternative Exhibition with the Secret Cinema—An Interview with Jay Schwartz,” Framework 49, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 115–37. 7. See for instance Janine Marchessault and Scott MacKenzie, eds., Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019).

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Index

8 mm film and technologies: artist use of, 26; cameras, 153fig., 172; codification of, 3, 60; emergence of, 76; institutional presence, 170, 234n72; print availability, 7; prints, 174; projectors, 170, 234n72; projector sales, 4, 153–54, 172, 186n23, 234n72; reduced prints, 186n23; sound projectors, 168, 230n28; success of, 60; use statistics, 154–55 9.5 mm film and technologies, 45, 58, 196n18 16 mm film and technologies: and amateur filmmaking, 59; artist use of, 26; Bell and Howell, 59–60, 137, 200n74; cameras, 25–26, 152, 153fig., 161; codification of, 3; design goals, 3; drive-ins, 159, 231n41; enthusiasm for, 143, 159, 233n68; and film scholars, 180–81, 237n3; and film societies, 143, 145, 151; Hollywood and, 156; industry partnerships, 59; institutional uses, 170fig., 171; military use of, 116, 118–19, 124, 233n68; obsolescence of, 180; organizations promoting, 171; and Pathé, 60; as portable standard, 59, 61, 64; postwar sales, 151–53; print availability, 7, 174; print reductions, 45, 56, 59–60, 116,

156, 174, 217n11; projection manuals, 61; projector networks, 143, 155–56; shipping numbers, 152–55; and sound, 161; standardization of, 59; success of, 60, 130; as system, 60, 200n70; Victor Animatograph, 60, 99, 101; wartime restrictions, 157; and widescreen, 137. See also Kodak and 16 mm film 22 mm film and technologies, 43, 45, 196n18 28 mm film and technologies, 43, 45, 58–59, 196n18. See also Pathéscope 28 mm projector 35 mm film and technologies: Cinerama, 149; flammability of, 42, 57; industry control of, 42; Jam Handy’s use of, 81; military uses of, 118, 124, 132–33, 135, 152, 173; name standardization, 58; nitrate stock, 40–41, 43, 57, 201n89; organizational exhibitions, 199n57; and portable projectors, 57; prints reduced from, 45, 56, 59–60, 116, 174, 217n11; rear projection, 106; standardization of, 42; terminology, 58; wartime exhibitions, 116; at World’s Fairs, 98, 214n87 Acland, Charles, 144–45, 169, 228n7, 229n20

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advertising: agencies, 88; analytic projectors, 166fig.; DeVry Challenger, 99, 100fig.; DeVry gunnery training, 136fig., 226n88; and early film, 77; and experimental film, 108; JAN P-229, 131; Kodak, 13, 14–15fig., 17fig.; mass market projectors, 163; military language in, 152, 229n26; Pathéscope, 43–45; Pathéscope 28 mm projector, 43–45; postwar, 159, 160fig., 163, 164fig., 172; Victor Animatograph, 157, 160fig., 223n61; wartime, 157, 158fig., 223n61; World’s Fair (Chicago), 85–86 Akeley, Carl, 215n115 Akeley-Leventhal, 104–6, 215n115 Albrecht, Donald, 92 Allied Non-Theatrical Film Association (ANTFA), 168, 171 Amateur Cinema League, 58 amateur filmmakers, 172, 177 amateur film and sound, 186n22 amateur-industry relations, 66 ambient cinema, 131 Ampro, 134, 157, 168 analytic projectors, 161, 165–68 Anderson, Henry, 199n57 anti-Hollywood ideals, 26 apparatus theory, 31 art, 25–28, 78, 139, 181, 189n56 Astruc, Alexandre, 26–27 AT&T, 72, 83 Audio Productions, 81, 88, 94, 111, 121 Bausch and Lomb, 52 Bel Geddes, Norman, 85, 92, 213n81 Bell and Howell: and 16 mm film, 59–60, 137, 200n74; advertising, wartime, 157; analytic projectors, 167–68; equipment presentations, 60, 200n74; Filmo Library, 66, 156; industry partnerships, 59; and magnetic sound, 168; military connections, 113, 119, 134, 161, 220n31; military language, use of, 152, 229n26; postwar prosperity, 161, 231n42; widescreen projectors, 137

Benjamin, Walter, 23 The Big Picture, 173 Bird, William, 79 Bray, John Randolph, 121 Buffalo Museum of Science, 212n72 Bush, Vannevar, 118, 219n24 business films, 174–75 Business Screen: advertisements in, 131, 136fig., 226n88; and industrial films, 80; lifespan of, 235n81; on military film applications, 236n95; portability, normalization of, 99; sales, emphasis on, 99, 101; and the World’s Fair (New York), 99 cameras: 8 mm, 153fig., 172; 16 mm, 25–26, 152, 153fig., 161; and film movements, 25–26, 189n46; portability of, 60; postwar production, 152–53; sales of, 153fig., 172; uncommon gauges, 196n18 caméra-stylo, 27 Cameron, James R., 62, 198n46, 201n88, 202n89 Capitol Theater, 47–48 Capra, Frank, 116 car movies, 91 Case, Percival, 162–63 Chrysler. See World’s Fair, Chrysler at cinema: complexity of, 179; documentary, 26–27; early history of, 41–42; and economic injustice, 77; expanded, 26, 139; expansion of, 1920s, 76; fluidity of, 30–31; institutional appropriations of, 30; lowtech versus hi-tech, 49; versus other media technologies, 38; as overlybroad term, 30; portable, 39, 41–45, 150; qualities, valuation of, 34; versus television, 150; term meaning, 31; term slippage, 31 Cinemascope, 137 cinéma vérité, 26, 189n46 cinematic apparatus, 30–31, 73, 179, 190n51 cinephilia, 143 Cinerama, 135, 148–50

Index Cogdell, Christina, 82 Cohen, Lizabeth, 146 Columbia, 156 communications programs, corporate, 78–81 consumerism, 66, 74, 146–47 Cook, W. B., 58 Cook, Willard, 203n100 corporate communications programs, 78–83 Cowan, Michael, 108 cultural movements and portability, 25–26, 67–70, 189n46 cultures of small cinema, 169–73 Cummings, Carlos E., 212n72 Dale, Edgar, 143 Da-Lite, 134 daylight cinema, 13, 61, 86, 101, 104, 106, 119, 132, 166fig., 225n75 department stores, 106 design protocols. See JAN design protocols Deskey, Donald, 83–85 DeVry Corporation: advertising, 99, 100fig., 136fig., 157, 226n88; gunnery training device, 136fig., 226n88; JAN protocol projectors, 129; magnetic sound projectors, 168; and military public relations, 134 direct cinema, 26, 139 Discrola projectors, 61 Disney, 116 dispositif, 30, 190n51 distribution, 174; and film importance, 34; and flammability, 40, 56; Hollywood and, 46, 155–56; in industry organization, 53–54; military, 111– 12, 118, 124, 224n68; MPPC control of, 42; small-gauge films, 6–7, 45, 56, 80, 88, 151, 174, 181; and theatrical exhibitions, 29; and vertical integration, 46 diversification movements, 27, 68 documentary cinema, 26–27 Doherty, Thomas, 116 DuPont film production, 52

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Eames, Charles and Ray, 78 Early cinema, 20, 41–43 Eastman Kodak Company. See Kodak economic injustice, 77 Edison Home Kinetoscope, 43, 195n12 education: audiovisual, 169–70; equipment promoted for, 137; film associations, 171; film use in, 64, 80, 233n68; and magnetic sound, 169; the National Defense Education Act, 170; portable projectors in, 3–4, 169– 70; and self-operation, 45; tachistoscopes, 167; technological ideologies, 145; training films, 80, 130, 174. See also military training films Educational Screen, 157, 166fig., 168, 235n81 Eisenstein, Sergei, 67, 204n109 Elaesser, Thomas, 33, 194n68 exhibition: definition of, 32; expansion, calls for, 68–69; and film’s importance, 34–35; and flammability, 40; functions enabled by, 180; military, 114fig., 124, 140; negotiated materialities of, 179–80; versus projection, 32; tiered systems, 46; types of, 34; venues, 63, 69–70. See also World’s Fair exhibitory impulses, 107 expanded cinema, 26, 139 experimental filmmaking, 27, 108, 229n22 extensive versus intensive viewing, 29 fairs, 77–78. See also World’s Fair Feaster, Patrick, 185n9 Federal Bureau of Investigations, 156, 230n30 film: as iterative, 33; prognostications for, early, 43 film associations and societies: ANTFA, 168, 171; Cinema 16, 151; emergence of, 68, 171, 178; growth of, 69; libraries of, 174; publications of, 171–72; size of, 172 Film Council of America (FCA), 143– 45, 159, 171, 227n2

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Film Culture, 26, 189n47 film degradation, 21–22, 188n33 film industry: 35 mm, control of, 42; and amateurs, 66; Ampro, 134, 157, 168; Disney, 116; as horizontal, 50, 197n34; and the military, 113, 116, 142, 217n12; organization of, 53–54; partnerships, 46–47, 59; portability impact debates, 66; and theaters, 29, 46; threats to, 155. See also Bell and Howell; DeVry Corporation; Hollywood; Jam Handy; Kodak; Society of Motion Picture Engineers; Victor Animatograph film languages, 26 film libraries. See libraries, film film stock, wartime restrictions on, 117, 121, 218n20 film studies: apparatus theory, 31; broad approaches to, 30; cinema as ideological apparatus, 190n51; international approaches, 30–31; movie theaters in, 31, 37, 193n64; and portable projectors, 180–81, 237n3; terminology, 31–33 film theory, 68–69, 143 fire safety, 199n57 flammability: overview of, 40–41; as barrier to film use, 57; early devices, 43; and gauge standardization, 58; and motion, 41; projection booths, 55–57; and regulation, 56–57, 198n46, 199n57; safety, 195n5, 199n57; sanctioned, 57–58 Flolite projector, 101, 102fig. Ford, John, 116 Ford Motor Company: film program, in-house, 91, 208n26; film uses, 91–92; Symphony in F, 94, 96; traveling clubs, 213n80; at World’s Fair New York, 83, 91–92, 94, 96 formats, 3, 6, 22, 29–30, 33, 39, 43, 45, 56–63, 72–73, 76, 90, 118, 135, 137– 38, 143, 149, 151–52, 155–56, 169– 70, 175, 180–81, 186n23, 223n60 Foucault, Michel, 199n51 Fuller-Seeley, Kathryn, 196n28

General Electric, 71 General Motors: A Car is Born, 81; A Coach for Cinderella, 94, 95fig.; exhibitions, 81, 209n35; film production, 91; film uses, 81, 91–93; and Jam Handy, 81, 93–94, 95fig.; public relations, 80–81. See also World’s Fair (New York 1939), General Motors at Gilbreth, Frank, 121, 221n42 Gilbreth, Lillian, 121 Gitelman, Lisa, 25, 33, 191n57 and n58 global village, 145 Goldsmith, Lloyd T., 221n34 Gomery, Douglas, 48, 106, 197n32 Gould, Symon, 68 the Great Depression, 76 Grierson, John, 27 Grieveson, Lee, 31, 91, 193n65, 200n26 Griffith, Richard, 96, 104 gunnery trainers, 133–37 Gutenberg Bible, 24–25 Handy, Henry Jamison, 209n33 H.D., 27 Hilderbrand, Lucas, 22 history of film: and contemporary media, 3; experimental movements, 139; flammability, 40; infrastructure expansion, postwar, 4, 181; as iterative, 33; movie theaters, 45–49, 196n28, 197n32; portability in, 19–20, 39; small format codification, 3 history of media, 25, 33 Hollywood: 16 mm prints, 156, 230n34; classical era, 20–21; Columbia, 156; and distribution, 46, 155– 56; and fairs, 212n67; MGM, 156, 230n31; and the military, 115–17, 119, 123, 140, 156; versus portable cinema, 21, 150; and portable projectors, 19, 41; resistance to, 69; and small-gauge networks, 155–56, 230n31; and television, 155, 230n31; United Artists, 156; Universal Studios, 156, 230n34; War Activities

Index Committee, 115; wartime special status of, 117, 125, 218n20; and World’s Fair New York, 89, 211n59 home audio, 147–48, 228n12 Hope, Thomas, 184n7, 230n28, 234n72 Hoyt, Eric, 155–56, 230n31 Huston, John, 116 Hyndman, D. E., 220n29, 229n25 Illustravox projector, 101, 103fig. image analysis, 161, 165–68 independent filmmaking, 26 industrial films: overview of, 76–77; Business Screen magazine, 80; Caravan of Progress, 81, 209n35; A Car is Born, 81; A Coach for Cinderella, 94, 95fig.; discourses of, 80; educational publicity, 208n26; Ford Motor Company, 91–92, 94, 96, 208n26; General Motors, 80–81, 93–94, 95fig., 209n35; growth in, 172, 174–75; infrastructure supporting, 80–81, 208n30; Jam Handy, 81, 209n33; libraries of, 96; and the military, 173; To New Horizons, 93–94; public relations campaigns, 78–83; restrictions on, wartime, 121; ’Round and ’Round, 94; sales, 80; Symphony in F, 94, 96; and synch sound, 80; and technological development, 110–11; tractor dealers, 209n34; worker morale and training, 80. See also Jam Handy infrastructure: expansion of, postwar, 4, 181; for industrial films, 80–81, 208n30; for performances, 178; the studio system’s, 52 jackrabbit shows, 19, 156, 230n30 Jam Handy: overview of, 209n33; and General Motors, 81, 93–94, 95fig.; and gunnery training machines, 134; and the military, 111, 121; publicity and advertising films, 88 JAN P-49 design protocol: overview of, 126; changes in, 233n59; development of, 125–26; illumination

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capabilities, 128, 224n63; image sizes, 128–29; impact of, 140–41, 227n105; portability of, 127–28; projectors adhering to, 129, 167; publication of, 126, 223nn58–59; requirements, 126–28; units following, 126, 127fig., 152, 168 JAN P-229 design protocol, 130–32, 225n79 Jenkins, C. Francis, 61 John Wannamaker’s Department Store, 43, 45 Jones, Lloyd A., 52–53 Katz, Mark, 185n9 Keightley, Keir, 147–48, 228n12 Kelley, Andrea, 131–32 Klinger, Barbara, 193n63 Kodak: analytic projectors, 166–67; Business Kodascope, 104, 185n13; business strategies, 59–60, 203n100; and hobbyists, 66; Kodascope Libraries, 59–60, 65, 200n69, 201n76, 203n100; Kodascope Library Unit, 12; Kodascope L projector, 13, 14–15fig.; and magnetic sound, 168; military connections, 113, 119, 161; nonflammable film, 195n13; Pageant Projector, 16–18; and Pathé, 203n100; photography, normalization of, 24; portability promotions, 24, 59; postwar prosperity, 161; and the studio system, 52, 198n41; at World’s Fair New York, 90, 212n73 Kodak and 16 mm film: Kodascope projectors, 60; libraries, 59–60, 65, 200n69, 201n76, 203n100; projection screens, 201n75; promotion of, 59; stock types, 59–60, 200n65 Kodascope Library, 59–60, 65, 200n69, 201n76, 203n100 Koszarski, Richard, 119 Kruse, William, 168 Larkin, Brian, 22 libraries, film: Bell and Howell’s, 66, 156; commercial, 173; examples of,

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libraries, film (continued) 65–66; increases in, 173–74; industrial, 96; Kodak’s, 59–60, 65, 200n69, 201n76; marketing, 66; military, 111, 124; Pathé’s, 45, 60, 66, 199n59; Universal Studios’s, 66; useful, 18 libraries, public, 171 Lipton, Lenny, 26 listening practices, 185n9 Little Theaters, 68–69 Loewy, Raymond, 210n47 Lorentz, Pare, 116 Lovejoy, Alice, 119, 139, 227n99 magnetic sound projectors, 17–18, 36, 168–69 magnetic tape, 139 Marchand, Roland, 78, 83, 96 Marquis, Alice Goldfarb, 91 Marzola, Luci, 197n34, 198n41 masculinity and hobbyism, 148 McCarthy, Anna, 33, 131 McLuhan, Marshall, 145–46, 150 Medbold, Anke, 195n11 media: devices, 23; formats, 30; gendering of, 148, 151; histories of, 25, 29, 179; hot-cool spectrum, 146, 150, 175; new versus old discourses, 66; portable, 1, 22, 24–25 Mekas, Jonas, 26, 189n47 Melnick, Ross, 47 MGM, 156, 230n31 the military: and Audio Productions, 111, 121; Disney partnerships, 116; exhibitions, 16, 114fig., 124, 140; and the film industry, 113, 116, 142, 217n12; film libraries, 111, 124; and Hollywood, 115–17, 119, 123, 218n18; and industrial films, 173; MPAA study and report, 111; Overseas Motion Picture Service, 116; and production companies, 111, 113–14, 121; public relations events, 134–35, 226n89; secrecy concerns, 121, 221n38; size increases, 111–12, 123; World War I, 121, 123, 222n44 the military, British, 133, 219n26

the military, Canadian, 219n26 the military, Czechoslovak, 220n26 the military, film production: Army Pictorial Service, 119, 120fig., 216n6, 223n52; budget for, 173; combat reports, 116; external uses of, 112, 216n6; footage produced, 112, 115, 119, 132, 173, 216n6, 217n12; internal uses, 111–12, 116; lending of, 173; soldier contributions to, 124; strategic, 111, 124; systems for, 119, 121, 221n38; television programs, 173, 216n6; topics, 123–24; and war bonds, 217n11 the military and film technology: 16 mm film, 116, 118–19; 35 mm, 118, 124, 132–33, 135, 152, 173; analytic projectors, 167–68; broadcast television program, 112; distribution, 111–12, 118, 124, 224n68; equipment sales, 151–52; expertise supporting, 111; film readers, 132–33; frame analysis, 132–33; innovations in, 113, 117–19, 139–41, 221n34; institutionalization of, 141; militarization of, 117; as necessity, 121; normalization of, 141–42; Pictorial Engineering and Research Laboratory, 119; postwar activity, 151–52, 172–73; research and development, 119, 121, 220n31, 221n38; and the SMPE, 113, 118–19, 219n26 the military and film technology, experiments with: overview of, 114–15; and aesthetic forms, 135, 137, 139; flight simulator simulators, 137–39; gunnery training, 133–37; versus Hollywood, 140; impact of, 140; information systems, 118; measurement systems, 119; needs addressed by, 140; Pictorial Engineering and Research Laboratory, 119; and public relations, 134; translucent screens, 215n112 the military-industrial complex, 113 the military and portable projectors: overview of, 16; operational

Index challenges, 128, 224n64; perspectives on, 115; rear-projection, 104; repair, 224n69; requirements for, 16, 63–64, 177–78; as standard equipment, 124; surplus equipment, 151–52, 229n22; technologies paired with, 114. See also JAN design protocols military training films: advantages of, 123; aircraft identification, 226n89, 226n96; Air Force, 121, 221n39; Disney-made, 116; gunnery systems, 133–37, 226n88; in interactive programs, 112, 123, 133–34; JAN P-229 consoles, 130–32; Navy, 121, 122fig., 123; percentage of total film use, 111; and programmability, 130; projection scenarios, 132; research into, 132, 225n75; SMPE reports on, 118; techniques, 225n75, 227n101; topics, 124, 222n49; World War I, 121, 222n44 Mills Industries, 131, 134 Mitchell, J. R., 62 Moholy-Nagy, Lazlo, 69 Monosson, L. I., 67 Montgomery Ward, 106, 215n116 Moore, Paul, 196n28 Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), 42 Motion Picture Projection and Sound Pictures, 62, 198n46, 201n88, 202n89 Movie Mite, 168 movies as commodities, 49 movie theaters: audiences, control over, 38; Capitol Theater, 47–48; and cultural practices, 2; as defining cinema, 2; and experiences, renting of, 49; versus fine arts venues, 37; and the Great Depression, 76; as hindrance, 66; history of, 45–49, 196n28, 197n32; identity-building strategies, 196n28; immobility of, 37–38; and industry consolidation, 46; industry logics, 29; luxury branding, 48; multiuse venues, 46;

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normative assumptions of, 29–30, 193n63; numbers of, 130; origins of, 42; picture palaces, 47–49, 76, 196n28; as point-of-sale, 42; and portable projectors, 5–6, 38–39; postwar decline, 4, 154; privileged positioning of, 31–32, 37, 193n63; product flows, 49; Radio City Music Hall, 76, 83; revenue, studio control of, 48, 197n32; Roxy’s, 47; size increases, 47–48; sound technologies, 46–47; spaces adapted as, 46; and standardization, 42; and synchronized sound, 75–76; technical challenges, 50; and tiered exhibition systems, 46; and vertical integration, 46, 48 moving images: Alexandre Astruc’s vision for, 27; corporate uses of, 76–77; diversification of, 19; encounters, variety of, 5–6; everyday nature of, 7; extensive versus intensive viewing, 29; and flammability, 41; international histories of, 29–30; negotiated materialities of, 179–80; normalization of, 3, 19, 28, 31, 34–35; and persuasion, 107; roots of, 77; and sales, 107; technology’s influence on, 34–35 Munson, Edward, 119 Murphy, Patrick, 143 museums, 212n72 Nagra recorders, 139 National Board of Review Magazine, 27 National Broadcasting Company, 71 National Defense Education Act, 35 National Fire Protection Agency, 199n57 newspaper columns, 171, 234n73 newsreels, 106, 115 New York Stock Exchange Movie Ticker, 106 nitrate film stock, 40–41, 43, 57, 201n89 nonflammable film, 43, 55–56, 58 nontheatrical phenomena: overview of, 32–33; film production, 174–75;

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nontheatrical phenomena (continued) portability, equation with, 64–65; term formalization, 171 numbers of, 129, 224n69 Office of War Information (OWI), 115, 144 paperback books, 223n60 the Paramount Decree, 20–21, 155 Pathé: 9.5 mm gauge, 45, 58, 196n18; film formats, 43, 45, 195n11, 195n13, 196n18; film library, 60; and Kodak, 203n100; and portable film standards, 58 Pathéscope 28 mm projector: adaptability of, 45; advertising for, 43–45; film library, 45, 66, 199n59; institutional uses, 45; and portable projector proposals, 56; speed controls, 61–62 Pathex system, 203n99 Paul, William, 48 Pedullà, Gabriele, 31 Perceptoscope, 167 performance infrastructures, 178 phono-cine-radio-recordo-graph, 8, 9fig. phonographs, 12–13, 185n9 picture palaces, 47–49, 76 pirate performances, 19 portability: overview of, 38; 1920s, 76; cameras versus projectors, 60; cultures of, 67–70; defining factors, 63; definition proposals, 55; diversification, enabling, 70; formats, 29–30; as growth imperative, 41; as historical category, 23–25; media, 1, 22, 24–25; as organizational principal, 41; and regulation, 198n46, versus scarcity, 25; term meanings, 22–23; term persistence, 22; venue considerations, 63 portability, the SMPE and: committees interested in, 64; cultures of, 67–68; defining characteristics, 62; definition proposals, 55; flammability concerns, 55; gauge standardization, 58; and industry, 70; interest

in, 50–51, 54–55, 197n35; variation in, 65 portable multimedia units, 8–9, 10–11fig., 12 portable projectors: overview of, 2–3; adaptability of, 16–17, 108; affordances of, 28–29; conceptualizations of, 28; applications of, 198n46, cultures of, 67–70, 169–73, 273n74; design of, 7–8, 12–13, 64, 141; discourses of, 145, 151, 156–57, 159, 163, 175; early, 42–43, 70; enthusiasm for, 159, 169, 171; as everyday media, 3; exhibitor objections to, 19; expandability of, 22; film circulation enabling, 6–7; films for, 21, 150, 174; futuristic ideals of, 176–77; 227n2; gendering of, 151; on the hot-cool media spectrum, 146, 150, 175; impacts of, 66, 144–45, 180; institutional needs and uses, 28, 64, 70; international organizations using, 140; and large-screen technologies, 137; magnetic projectors, 18; manufacturing of, 145–46, 152–53; mass market, 141, 162–63; and media engagement possibilities, 176; media environment of, 146–48; and movie functions, 7; versus movie theaters, 5–6, 154–55; moving image normalization, 35; multimedia capabilities, 131; as multi-media machines, 161; number in use, 154–55, 230n28; operating context considerations, 13; portability of, 161–62; production statistics, 125, 129–30, 225n71, 228n4; programmability, 173–74; and public policy, 35; qualities of, 34; repair shops, 5fig.; roots of, 39, 41–45; sales and ownership increases, 4, 184nn5–7; as sales devices, 99, 101; sales figures, 152–54, 230n28; safety, 201n89; self-operating, 13, 16–18, 28–29; and signal traffic, 22; silent-only, 18, 152, 153tab., 154fig., 155tab., 166, 184n5, 186n23, 211n53, 225n71,

Index 230n28; simplicity, emphasis on, 162; in small-media ecosystems, 8; spread of, 150–52, 175, 177; studying, importance of, 178–79; technological contexts, 28; and technological development, 41, 110–11, 161; technological problems, 21–22; types of, 146; user statistics, 170tab.; uses, variety of, 175; venue considerations, 63; and viewing practices, 5–7, 29; wartime, 125, 157–59, 161, 231n37 Potamkin, Harry Alan, 27, 190n54 Prelinger, Rick, 209n33 Prime, Rebecca, 135 print materials about film, 171–72 production companies, non-Hollywood, 174 programmability, 5–7, 18, 31, 173–74, 190n54 projectability, 23–24, 141, 179 projection as media-making, 168–69 projection booths, 55–57, 198n46, 201n89 projectionists: clandestine, 55–56; self-operation enabling, 13, 45, 162; SMPE members, 51; and sound, 168; training films, 174 projection manuals, 62–63, 198n46, 201n88, 202n89 projection versus exhibition, 32 publications, film-oriented, 171–72, 235n81 public relations: children, targeting of, 94; industrial films, 78–83; military, 134–35, 226n89 public safety, 40 publishing industry, 174 Radiant Manufacturing Corporation, 137 Radiant Screen, 134 Radio Corporation of America (RCA): advertising, postwar, 163, 164fig.; advertising, wartime, 157; magnetic sound projectors, 168; military connections, 113, 161; portable music

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studies, 24; postwar prosperity, 161; television, early, 71–72; at World’s Fair 1939, 83 rear projection: advantages of, 101; business machines, 104–6, 185n13; consoles, uses of, 131–32; JAN P-229 design protocol, 130–32, 225n79; in newsreel theaters, 106–7; “the Merchandiser,” 104–6; TransLux systems, 106; uses of, 104, 197n35 reduction prints, 59, 66, 156, 174, 186nn22,23 reproducibility, 23 Richardson, F. H., 199n56 Rockefeller Foundation, 212n72 Rogers, Ariel, 81 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 71 Rothafel, Samuel, 47–48, 50, 196n23 Rydell, Robert, 82 safety, 201n89 Schaefer, Eric, 236n97 screens: the dynamic square, 67; large, 137; translucent, 215n112; types of, 129; wides, 135, 137, 138fig., 149–50; at World’s Fairs, 98–99 Sears, 106, 215n115 self-operation: overview of, 13, 16; cultural impacts of, 68–69; and education, 45; emphasis on, 63, 70, 179; examples of, 16–17, 29; mass market appeal, 162; military requirements for, 16; programmability, 5–7, 18, 31, 173–74 serial films, 196n28 signal traffic, 22 silent film, 101, 168, 188n22, 215n100 small cinema cultures, 169–73 small-gauge film and technologies: amateurism, associations with, 39; and the FCA, 145; filmmaking versus film viewing, 145; film movements enabled by, 25–26, 189n46; films made for, 174; and flammability, 58; format codification, 3; format similarities, 29–30; ideologies of,

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small-gauge film and technologies (continued) 27; and portability imperatives, 39; standardization of, 58–59; sound, 190n22. See also individual gauges Smith, Courtland, 197n35 Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE): Alexander Victor, 55–56, 58; and amateurs, 67; cross-industry collaboration, 51–52; cultural considerations, 54; debates, internal, 50–51; and film gauge terminology, 58; founding of, 49; industry, conceptualizations of, 52–54; and innovation, 54, 65; John Grierson, 68; Journal of, 64, 118; Lloyd A. Jones, 52–53; and mass market projectors, 162–63; members, 51, 197n36; and the military, 113, 118–19, 219n26; Nomenclature Committee, 58, 64; Non-Theatrical Equipment Committee, 64, 203n97; Percival Case, 162–63; Progress Committee, 64–65; Roy Winton, 68; Samuel Rothafel, 47–48; and Sergei Eisenstein, 67, 204n109; and the Soviet Union, 67; standardization work, 51, 229n25; and the studio system, 51–53, 197n36; Symon Gould, 68; Symposium on Portable Projectors, 60; technological developments, 49–51; technological imagination of, 52; and television, 197n36; War Standards Committee, 229n25. See also portability, the SMPE and sound effects, 16, 96, 169, 186n19, 228n12 sound technologies: 8 mm projectors, 168, 230n28; fidelity discourses, 163, 164fig.; home audio, 147–48, 228n12; industry partnerships, 46–47; magnetic sound projectors, 17–18, 36, 168–69; and portable projectors, 16–18, 186n22; recording, 161; synchronized, 75–76, 80, 186n23 Spigel, Lynn, 33, 147 Sponable, I. E., 203n95

standardization: of 16 mm, 59; of 35 mm, 42; and flammability, 58; and movie theaters, 42; organizations for, 51; of portability, 59; smallgauge, 58–59; the SMPE and, 51, 229n25 Sterne, Jonathan, 30 Stevens, David, 212n72 the studio system, 52, 198n41 Sussman, Warren, 82 synchronized projectors, 90, 212nn73,74 synchronized sound, 75–76, 80, 186n23 Teague, Walter Dorwin, 85 technical improvements to, 129 Technicolor, 213n75, 214n94 technologies, film: Cinerama, 135, 148–50; in consumer ecologies, 74; on the hot-cold media spectrum, 150; improvements in, 117–18, 139, 148–49; in information environments, 118, 219n24. See also the military and film technology; sound technologies technology, disposable, 223n60 technology, impacts of, 34–35 television: ambient, 131; and box office declines, 150; versus cinema technologies, 150; and domestic life, 147; early, 72; and the film industry, 21, 187n30; Franklin D. Roosevelt and, 71; versus hi-fi audio, 148; in media history, 29; military-provided footage, 173; in public spaces, 147; spread of, 147; and the World’s Fair 1939, 71–72 Tepperman, Charles, 195n11 This is Cinerama, 135 time-motion studies, 121, 161, 165 training films, 80, 130, 174. See also military training films Trans-Lux Corporation, 106–7 United Artists, 156 United States Information Agency, 172

Index Universal Studios, 156, 230n34 Urban, Charles, 61 Uricchio, William, 33, 179, 194n68, 215n116 useful cinema: film libraries, 18; timemotion studies, 121, 161, 165; training films, 80, 130, 174; wartime, 139. See also education venues, 63, 69–70 vertical integration, 46, 48 Victor, Alexander, 37, 55–56, 58–59 Victor Animatograph Company: 16 mm technologies, 60, 99, 101; Add-a-Unit system, 8–9, 10–11fig., 12, 101; advertising, 157, 160fig., 223n61; military connections, 113; Victor 33 projector, 99, 101 Victory at Sea, 173 viewing practices, 4–7, 29 Vitarama, 90 Wagner, Paul, 143–45, 159, 171, 227n2 Waldron, Gloria, 129, 233n68 Waller, Fred, 90, 133, 159, 213n77 Waller, Greg, 157, 195n15 Waller Gunnery Trainer, 133–35 war movies, 115 War Production Board, 125, 231n37 Westinghouse, 71–72, 76, 83 Whalen, Grover, 88 widescreen technologies, 135, 137, 138fig., 149–50 Williams, Raymond, 179 Winston, Brian, 202n92 Winton, Roy, 68 Wolfman, Augustus, 184n5 Wolfman Report, 184n5 Worker’s Film and Photo League, 69 World’s Fair (Chicago 1933), 85–86, 87fig., 98–99, 211n53 World’s Fair (New York 1939): overview of, 72–73, 110; Amusement Area, 215n100; anti-acid ads, 106, 215n117; the apparatus as show, 107; booth films, 104; Carlos E. Cummings’s study of, 212n72; The

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City, 89; Communications Building, 83, 84fig.; and consumerism, 74–75, 106; and corporate profiteering, 107–8; Donald Deskey, 83–85; Exhibition Techniques report, 212n74; exhibitors, 89; and fair publicity, 88; and the fair’s themes, 88; films shown, 90; Ford Motor Company, 83, 91–92, 94, 96; foreign governments, 89; Fred Waller, 90, 213n77; Grover Whalen, 88; historical contexts, 82; and Hollywood, 89, 211n59; impact of, 90–91; incorporating individuals, 82; and industrial practice, 75; industrial public relations, 82; industrial showmanship, 83–85; Kodak at, 90; “Let’s Go to the Fair,” 88–89; Little Theater, 89; magical car tropes, 96; media coverage of, 89; motion, uses of, 83; newsreel teams recording, 88; Norman Bel Geddes, 85; participant-based exhibits, 72, 205n3; The Plow that Broke the Plains, 89; Production and Distribution Exhibit, 212n73; projections, nontheatrical, 73; projections in displays, 91; projectors, synchronized, 90, 212nn73–74; projectors at, 72, 98, 108, 205n6; as public relations, 82–83; purposes of, 82; rear projection, 104, 106–7; The River, 89; screening attendance, 89; and showmanship technologies, 108–9; signature buildings, 83; small screens, 98–99; television at, 71–72; theaters, 73, 89; utopianism of, 71, 82, 108; varieties of, 73–74, 99; Walter Dorwin Teague, 85; women figures at, 82–83; “World of Tomorrow” theme, 71–72, 74, 85, 108, 110 World’s Fair (New York 1939), Chrysler at: film uses, 91–92; “Rocket Port of the Future,” 96, 97fig.; theater, 97; In Tune with Tomorrow, 90, 96–97, 98fig., 214n92, 214n94 World’s Fair (New York 1939), General Motors at: A Coach for Cinderella,

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World’s Fair (New York 1939) (continued) 94, 95fig.; films shown, 214n87; film uses, 81, 91–92; Futurama, 92–93; To New Horizons, 93–94; pavilion budget, 210n40; ’Round and ’Round, 94; theater, 89, 94 World War I, 121, 123 World War II: 35 mm exhibitions, 116; advertising, 157, 158fig., 223n61; equipment manufacturer expansion, 125; film stock restrictions, 117, 121, 218n20; footage on television,

173; industrial film restrictions, 121; Office of War Information, 115, 144; portable projectors during, 125, 157–59, 161, 231n37; projector donation requests, 125, 177; technical innovations, 139; useful cinema, 139; War Production Board, 125, 231n37. See also the military Wyler, William, 116 Youngblood, Gene, 26 Zimmerman, Patricia, 66, 220n31

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